This week 2 big companies specialized each in a different area launched the same product namely Unified communications, these 2 companies are Microsoft and Cisco. Now what is this "Unified communications" well if I quote Microsoft "it bridges the gap between telephony and computing to deliver real-time messaging, voice and conferencing to the desktop environment". Now if we take the definition of Cisco it says "Unified Communications is helping you integrate communications more closely with business processes, ensuring that information reaches recipients every time and everywhere, no matter what their working environment, through the most appropriate medium". They both look at the product from a totally different point of view, one as a software vendor, one more as a hardware vendor and they say it differently but they actually mean more or less the same thing. Maybe if we look at a little movie that I found on Geert's blog everything will become more clear.

You can also find an explanatory movie and site from Cisco here. I guess in a few months we'll see who wins this fight.