ViaVoice VAR fumes about IBM's desktop strategy

AFTER OUR article on Vista's bundled voice recognition, wondering what it might mean for competitors Nuance and IBM, the owner of a ViaVoice VAR company wrote the INQ, apparently fuming about IBM's product strategy.

The reader requested to remain anonymous, so we will honour that request. Suffice to say that his entire business wouldn't exist without IBM ViaVoice, and he has built his company and products around Big Blue's voice recognition product, so his concern is very real, as the strategy of IBM -or lack thereof- with regards to its desktop product can put his whole company and business model in danger. Here are his thoughts, unedited. We think it's worth reading, specially if read and acted upon by the suits at the once witty Corporation.

IBM has a history of developing excellent products but when the price point becomes too low - they sell it off or abandon it...

For example - they had best of breed Anti-virus program. But AV became an inexpensive piece of software to update vs. something requiring ongoing value added services so they sold it to what is now Norton AV.

Note that IBM ended its program with its speech business partners a couple of years ago and have not gone beyond ViaVoice 10 (with 10.5 to accommodate Office 2003) What did they do? They gave distribution of their software to their arch competitor - Scansoft - now Nuance who had purchased the Dragon line. Which chick in the nest is going to be fed - your product or the one they dropped in on you... Nuance even solicited sales from IBM ViaVoice customers offering discounts to move them to Dragon...

IBM's view seemed to be that desktop applications will eventually become unimportant as everything scales to server wide voice aps like telephony or to hand-held aps. The desktop disappears or is too small a market in this view...

No doubt that IBM also knew that MS was going to get further into the speech game following their clunky attempts in XP. So thus you see IBM bow out ahead of the battle... moving on to other things.

At the risk of repeating myself, I have to say that I agree with the INQ reader and ViaVoice VAR. I think Big Blue is losing a tremendous opportunity by just sitting over the Viavoice for Linux code, instead of offering it freely for all open sauce hacks to play and build nice things with.

I should also note that in my original article, I referred to watching a local demo of Vista's speech recognition engine in Spanish language, not the almost-famous botched demo in English that plenty of our readers referred to their feedback e-mail. Incidentally, a blogger at Redmondia noticed my article and blogged about it, sadly without commenting if such bundling might be at odds with the antitrust regulations, given the Redmond juggernaut's ironclad grip on the desktop OS market. µ

See Also
OneStat: Windows dominates the OS market with 96.97 per cent
MSFT: Glutton for Market Share
Vista faces "difficult position" in Europe
Microsoft's Windows Vista speech recognition to silence ViaVoice, Nuance?
IBM invents voice navigation of a desktop OS navigation, ten years ago
Nuance Scansoft thinks Microsoft voice technology poor
Open Sourced IBM speech recognition code doesn't include ViaVoice
Review: Dragon Naturally Speaking gets close(r) to perfection