Gates continue to talk about what’s needed in unified communications

Gates live — at Bill Graham Auditorium — talks about Microsoft’s new unified communications offering.

“Software innovation is being brought to the business phone call.” Gates still continues to call it a phone call. Very old school.

Gates alludes to AT&T.

[See also: Bill Gates live from San Francisco | Microsoft: The next AT&T? | Video: Bill Gates launches OCS | Bill Gates launches OCS, part II | Bill Gates launches OCS, part III ]

Once you picked a PBX vendor that was it. Even if they didn’t make a lot of money on an initial sale, Gates said, if you wanted to move a phone, that cost. Gates says it cost him $700 and a week’s lead time to move a single phone.

Gates described that when AT&T ran the only telecommunications network, directory and environment, there wasn’t much you could do.

“People just accepted this as the way it was.”

This was the way it was in the PC industry as well, says Gates. But now Bill claims companies like Microsoft and Intel changed those types of monopolistic practices. Hmmm.

Now, says Gates, because each layer uses a specialized company and technology the single company strangle hold is broken.

We are witnessing a revolutionary change from the vertical to the horizontal. Now you can take digital services and put it beside the PBX so you can get presence and other benefits with your PBX, Gates told the audience.

However, Gates sees this as an interim step. Part of the communications evolution.

According to Gates the PBX will eventually disappear and we will have a 100 percent transformation to software based communications.

“This is as profound as the shift from the typewriter to the PC,” Gates said.

The level of innovation you unleash when you get communications on to a software platform is unlimited, Gates told the audience.

While Gates claims the cost savings for UC comes from reducing phone time such as reducing the time people have to be put on hold until the right person is found, plus it adds the richness of screen sharing, which reduces the need for travel, again Gates seems to miss a major business point.

Jeff Raikes, came on stage and he too seems to miss the point. Raikes says business users waste 37 minutes a day making calls to people who are not around. “That adds up to 30 hours a year,” said Raikes.

Big whoop. The real cost savings will come from embedding presence and identity into enterprise applications like ERP or CRM applications.

Knowing presence in Word or a PowerPoint might be nice but if you are an insurance company mid-level exec waiting for an approval, you can save days not minutes in an approval process by finding the right person.

Perhaps this wasn’t mentioned because the Microsoft UC system is all about the desktop and adding yet another application to it. Rather it should be about integration and embedding these UC capabilities into other applications.

Gates seems to have missed the main point of cost savings, that is reduced time due to presence. It is about embedding UC into a workflow to reduce the time spent in routing and approvals.