Microsoft, Cisco and competitive collaboration

Stuart Corner
Friday, 16 March 2007 09:04

Opinion and Analysis

But collaboration is not just about sending verbal or text messages, knowing when someone is available and how to reach them. It is about collaborating on shared work projects, and in most enterprises this means collaborating on documents in Microsoft applications: Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.

As the developer of the applications and the operating system under which they run, Microsoft clearly has a lead on any of the telephony companies. So it should come as no surprise that Cisco is prepared to fork out $3.2 billion for WebEx: a company that will enable it compete with Microsoft in this space.

The stakes in this game are huge. With its dominant position in enterprise applications and its increasing power in communications and collaboration Microsoft has the potential to dominate all three markets. It will be far harder for the traditional communications system vendors, which are not in the enterprise applications space, to maintain their ground.

Today all co-operate and collaborate with Microsoft but with the threat of competitions growing stronger by the day these must be uneasy partnerships.