Communications Solutions 1999 Products Of
The Year
[Go To Products Of The Year
List]
As voice and data converge, overlapping ever more broadly, commingling ever more
intimately, they give rise to a teeming array of hybrids. And these hybrids have grown so
numerous, and demonstrate such mutability, that they pose a challenge to anyone who would
divine their relationships to each other, much less hazard a guess as to which were
destined to dominate any particular niche.
And yet it is exactly this challenge we have taken on in this awards feature. From the
start, we were dissatisfied with merely recalling the year's most memorable releases.
Instead, we resolved to go a step further, and impose a sense of order over the swarm of
new products and emerging technologies.
In yielding to this impulse towards order, we did what people confronted with novelty
and seeming chaos often do: we applied names. For giving things names is a tried-and-true
way of establishing control. The technique is even described in Genesis, which shows God
bringing every living thing before Adam to be named.
Applying names is especially powerful when the names themselves are subordinated to a
taxonomy - a taxonomy, moreover, designed to correspond with a particular ecology. The
ecology with which we're interested is the ecology of convergence. And our taxonomy, like
any taxonomy, fits any one organism (or product) into an overall scheme, laying bare
otherwise obscure relationships and hidden hierarchies.
For the uppermost layer of our taxonomy, we chose the same divisions that we use
throughout our publication. These divisions, as a review of our Products Of The Year table
will reveal, include enabling technologies, corporate solutions, customer contact,
next-gen networks, and next-gen services.
Within this broad framework, we devised finer divisions, fine enough to accommodate a
fairly large number of notable new products. And yet, for all the products we include in
this feature, we present but a small subset of the releases announced over the past year.
We contented ourselves, in effect, with selecting a few outstanding products before moving
on to another category, ultimately cutting a narrow (if lengthy) swath as we explored a
succession of categories.
Another limitation of our awards feature is a limitation common to all taxonomies. That
is, many products defy easy categorization; some even chafe at the confines in which we've
placed them. All the same, we've discovered that many products were more easily classified
than we might have guessed.
Often, vendors are so reluctant to be pigeon-holed that they demonstrate no small
talent in marketingspeak, creating names and categories of their own, as though a unique
name - one ignoring any generally understood taxonomy - would somehow elevate a product
beyond classification. Unprecedented names we see too often for us to remain long in their
thrall.
We do acknowledge, however, that in the ecology of convergence, technology does move so
quickly that any classification scheme is soon obsolete. Those of us grappling with
convergence already deal with the sorts of problems that are bound to vex biologists as
genetic research brings forth its more peculiar cross-breeds.
Hence, our classification is both imperfect and provisional. It should, however,
suffice for the moment, and offer some guidance, suggesting something approaching a
comprehensive view. So, without further preliminaries, we present our 1999 Products Of The
Year, which together constitute a kind of monument - a monument as solid as any that would
commemorate the face of voice/data convergence.
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