Microsoft’s entry into the small phone system market a couple of years ago with the introduction of the Microsoft Response Point phone system was kicked off with much fanfare and anticipation of great technology. I’ve kept a close competitive eye on Microsoft’s developments over the last while with the expectation that their product would become more of a threat to the marketplace, and so I read some of the announcements on the Microsoft Reponse Point Blog site with interest, most specifically, this blog posting from early May.
This week we made some changes to the Response Point business. I am not expecting impact on current customers as we will maintain the current version of the product. We want to take a good look at the next version of Response Point and ensure it addresses the needs of Small Businesses. We are thankful for the support we have received from our partners to date. We will continue to support our current OEMs, Service Providers and resellers that are selling Response Point v1.0. We will also continue to promote the product and our partners on-line. We believe there is a plenty of room for delivering breakthrough products in the communication space and will continue to investigate the opportunity in the small business segment.
This somewhat cryptic message from Microsoft was certainly not the strong message their customers and dealers were hoping for.
The last posting on their blog site was posted June 26th with the announcement of a departure of a key executive of the RP team. It’s now been over 2 weeks since they posted an update, leaving many wondering what Microsoft is up to.
I suspect they’ve got their business focus very targeted on the larger cloud space, and Google more specifically with Google’s recent announcement of going into the OS market with Chrome some time next year.
I liked the first iteration of the RP product and was hoping to see more great things from the product. It’s rather disappointing to see them stepping (or if not stepping away then providing some strong assurances of continuing with the product moving forward). The market needs some healthy competition from the likes of Microsoft.
