That will only be true, however, as long as relatively few people use the service. Throw in a bunch of telephone callers, and the latency and overload problems will only grow intolerably worse for everyone. Not only was the Net not designed to stream audio and video in real time, it wasn't designed to handle such traffic for millions of simultaneous users. The bet in this corner is that the company wants to fend off even limited usage of a product that takes customers away from its conventional long-distance service. Mount an Internet long-distance effort, have it catch on to the point where people decide it's worthless, and kill off the category.
Nobody goes there anymore, because it's too crowded.
A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier. His book on virtual reality will be published this year by Random House. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in any form.