There's an interesting little tidbit buried near the bottom of this NYT story about the Cisco Xobni investment: It's another wicked little Cisco trick, on the order of purchasing Jabber after Avaya had incorporated the Jabber protocol XMPP into its own Intelligent Presence Server. Obviously Cisco's not going around looking for these relatively minor ways to mess with their competitors, but I think this is an indication that Cisco is continually looking for openings to exploit.
The point isn't that 20% of Microsoft is now using a piece of software that's part-owned by Cisco; it's that 20% of Microsoft employees tacitly admitted that, as the quote (from Xobni's CEO) at the end of the Times story says, "Outlook's a real pain."
It goes back to what I wrote yesterday: Maybe owning the desktop isn't all it's cracked up to be, or isn't all it used to be. Maybe if you control the user's email client, you don't necessarily inherit that customer for everything else they use for desktop communication.
