Response Point Team Blog : Microsoft

Full Speed Ahead for Response Point

sprague — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:43:04 GMT

In today’s ugly economy, you don’t have to look far to hear news about cutbacks and losses. Many of our friends have been wondering whether this affects Response Point, so we thought it would be helpful to give you this brief update to let you know that our team continues to move full speed ahead. Like every business, we watch our bottom line carefully, but we also recognize that the future belongs to those who are willing to invest for the long run, and that’s exactly what we’ll continue to do: focus on making what Paul Thurrott at Windows IT Pro calls “one of the most elegant products Microsoft has ever created”.

In fact, while the rest of the economy might be gloomy, a recent poll of some of our top resellers showed that while about one third said that they thought their overall business was worse than three months ago (and only 10% said it was better), about two thirds said their RP business is about the same, and 25% said it’s getting better.

So we’re pushing forward even faster, and our entire team is very busy right now preparing for some important good news we’ll announce at ITExpo on February 2nd. We think you’ll like our upcoming announcements and will want to invest even more in Response Point.

Response Point SP1 RTM'ed

Xuedong David Huang — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:50:00 GMT

When we started RP, our vision was simple: to provide a telephony solution so easy to use that every small business customer can set it up like connecting a printer to the PC. Today, we are moving one step closer to realize our vision by releasing to manufacturing Response Point Service Pack 1. Our OEM partners will bring SP1 to market next month. Current Response Point 1.0 customers will be able to download SP1. Please visit http://www.microsoft.com/responsepoint on July 8th for details. SP1 is a simple and free download that takes a matter of minutes for you to install.

SP1 not only improved RP 1.0's performance/quality but also added some very cool features such as VOIP gateway, Click to Call, and Call Presence etc. Never before was PBX this easy to use and manage.

UW EE Colloquium: How did we run a startup inside Microsoft?

Xuedong David Huang — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:37:00 GMT

I will be giving a talk at UW on May 6th, 2008 on our RP and core technology development story.

How did we run a startup inside Microsoft?

Delivering value to small businesses with the right product offering challenges many product teams at Microsoft. The Response Point team is no different. How did we enter into the competitive IP telephony market with a differentiated solution? I will discuss how the Response Point team’s vision of simplicity guided the team from conceptualizing the business proposal through product development and product launch as a startup experiment in a large enterprise. While technologies are critical, it is the use of technologies in the right context that is more critical to the success of the product. Response Point’s magic blue button illustrates how speech recognition technologies can be used to help small business customers managing their daily phone activities.

Response Point RTM'd

Xuedong David Huang — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 19:22:00 GMT

“Of particular interest is the ’Magic‘ button which brings voice recognition technology into the world of the SMB in a new way”

Steve Hilton—Yankee Group

"I've looked into Response Point, and it looks like a compelling solution for small businesses who just want basic PBX features like dial tone and voice mail."

Travis Fisher—Inacom Information Systems

These are the words from some of the well respected analysts when we RTM'd Microsoft Response Point this week.

Response Point, a start up experiment in the enterprise, started from a BillG think week paper (CommPC). With the support from numerous MS executives (Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Craig Mundie, Rick Rashid, Dan Ling, Kevin Turner, Scott Di Valerio, Eduardo Rosini, Mike Park, Anoop Gupta, and Gurdeep Pall...), we formed a “start up” in Microsoft Research because of the cross-P&L nature of our work. CommPC team received “Round A” funding from Bill Gates in March 2005. The project changed its codename to “Edinburgh” after we received Round B funding. The codename of Edinburgh was chosen because Edinburgh is the birthplace of Alexander Graham Bell - speaking the team’s high aspiration to reinvent phone systems from the ground up for our underserved small biz customers. Yes, we wanted to do this from the ground up, not to strip down an enterprise-grade system for small biz customers like many of our competitors did in the past.

I enjoyed the VC-funding model from Microsoft Research and I really think this nurtured the start up during the last 2 years. This not only forced our team to work and act like a start up but also gave us the freedom to think and act out of the box. Because we started from scratch, we had to first build up our team. We faced challenges to balance our starter-type of researchers and finisher-kind of talents. We brainstormed frequently, recruited some outstanding talents (both starters and finishers), created many prototypes and demos, engaged with lots small biz customers, partnered with our OEM friends (and lost a few too), shielded randomization from some of our internal groups, and finally shipped this great product. The best experience for me personally is that I am able to correct many mistakes on the fly and I can depend on so many talented people in the team to make things happen (frequently better than expected).

We know the small business market is underserved. 10% of US small businesses use VoIP solutions. Our team is proud that we are able to help the underserved customers. This is not an ordinary team. This is the group with a sense of mission and pride. This is why we will achieve our goals to address the pain points of small businesses and grow the market from 10% to 80%.

Like Steve Hilton from Yankee Group pointed out, the magic button will connect small biz users emotionally. We focused on the ease of use and ease of management and I am happy others are able to see the magic impact with Response Point’s magic touch…

I am incredibly proud of being a part of this small and elite team that made this happen!