i've been thinking about microsoft response point for a couple weeks i think
i'm going to briefly (no) tell you about microsoft response point. ok so it's a pbx. and the significance of this is much larger than it may at first seem
in 2007 microsoft just up and decided to make a PBX. no, they didn't. they did the thing they have kind of a track record for, and they made a PBX *standard* in order to sell software to support it
(this is what they did with the MSX in Japan for instance; Microsoft Japan partnered with some other companies to design a computer standard, then didn't actually build it - but every one did come with their BASIC, so this was presumably the motive)
microsoft response point was an IP phone system but as far as i can tell it wasn't a program you installed on Windows. I'm not really sure how it worked under the hood, because it didn't run on a PC or server, it was an *embedded system*. it was for appliances.
so what did a Response Point PBX look like?
awful. they looked atrocious. because they were all made by bargain-basement network hardware vendors like, as seen here, mother fucking D-Link.
awful. they looked atrocious. because they were all made by bargain-basement network hardware vendors like, as seen here, mother fucking D-Link.
that's a D-Link voip phone, a D-Link PSTN gateway (lets your IP PBX talk to normal phone lines) and the D-Link VoiceCenter. sad, plasticky garbage.
when I said it doesn't run on a PC, that was a lie, because here's the back of those instruments and you can VERY CLEARLY see that the VoiceCenter is absolutely, definitely, unquestionably, some godawful PC-based piece of shit
i wager that if you found one of these day and opened it up it would be a celeron with passive cooling, 256MB of RAM at most, and blown capacitors from stem to stern
there were other vendors, as noted. Aastra made something that doesn't seem too mortifying, although it looks like a 2005 Dell Optiplex.
microsoft cancelled the whole thing after like one year, before they even implemented busy lamp fields or conference calls. I mean, this thing was primitive. But there was time for one (1) more vendor to enter the market.
the Syspine A50 is nothing less than an Xbox 360 that you make phone calls through. like, look at the back. It's an Xbox 360. it's a video game phone
you may notice that there is a button next to the control panel, and it looks very much like the control panel comes off, like a car radio faceplate. obviously this is true, yes, it absolutely does that. but why?
because it can be hung on the wall with two dinky screws, in which case you'd need to invert the faceplate to use it.
naturally the syspine phones are deeply uninspiring. you can bet the mouthfeel on these bastards was rubbery. they probably feel like a V-Tech My First Laptop
this whole thing was designed for a max load of 50 users. i don't think it could do more than about eight calls at a time
There appears to have been a third-party PRI module from a company with the INCREDIBLY unfortunate name "Quintum," which got acquired by genband and then ribbon of course.
I guess a lot of what fascinates me about this is just that PBX appliances are historically terrible, but they come in two varieties
- Completely proprietary in-house shitshow (Avaya IP Office, Samsung Officeserv)
- Asterisk with a coat of paint
- Completely proprietary in-house shitshow (Avaya IP Office, Samsung Officeserv)
- Asterisk with a coat of paint
It's very strange that Microsoft decided to take another shit in the shared toilet of IP telephony.
