The latest edition of SIP Magazine is out along with my article on SMB desktop communications, here is an excerpt....
While building Xten (now Counterpath), I was exposed to many business plans and product strategies that were years in the making. Many of the carriers’ softphone plans were focused on the Enterprise. Near the end of my time there I saw a shift towards the SMB. Now some of the largest operators on the planet are integrating softphones, Outlook plug-ins, browser toolbars, and SDKs that enable rich IP Communications on SMB and Enterprise user’s desktops. We have come a long way since NetMeeting although it took a while before we actually saw the same features in SIP that H.323 applications could offer. If you think about it, NetMeeting was a pretty good app for its time, offering a fairly complete SDK and let’s not forget the “callto:” html tags which Skype, and others, have since used as their own.