Last week, longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Joe Foley opined that Microsoft has a “grand plan to eliminate phone numbers.” She cited direct quotes from speeches that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have made among the international carrier community. Foley refers to a new software “platform” called Echoes designed to enable telecom service providers to sync diverse address books, seamlessly send messages between IM and SMS and assign a local telephone number to people using Windows Live Messenger.

The coverage has provoked skeptical responses from just about every quarter of high-tech punditry. Within three days, there were more than 160 responses to Foley’s blog posting, compared to a mere four that are associated with the original post in which she described Echoes. Overall, commentators doubt Microsoft’s ability to carry it off (where “it” means the elimination of phone numbers). They see the efforts as too grandiose, in that it ties many diverse software elements together, or totally unnecessary, given that synching services have been around forever as a “local” function and that telcos have been largely ineffective in marketing their own flavor.

As for generating a local number associated with Live Messenger namespaces, it’s an idea that closely resembles the initial intent of Grand Central (now owned by Google), which provides a single number through which people can reach a recipient’s office, home or wireless phone (or voicemail service) according to rules established and maintained by the Grand Central subscriber.

The pithiest and most scathing critique came from Om Malik who criticized Microsoft both for lack of originality and for blind adherence to its long-standing business practices, noting that “…there is nothing new here, except for the need of being tied to Microsoft’s platforms. Echoes’ outlines Microsoft’s biggest challenges: the inordinate amount of time they spend on developing products that are either a platform or a suite forces them to make too many compromises.”

This Shouldn’t be about Phone Numbers
Telephone numbers are largely passé. People with wireless phones dial from their contact list. The most common protocol for wireless phones is to enable subscribers to automatically associate inbound phone numbers with the name of the individual. Efforts for both fixed line and wireless carriers to market a “network address book” have been largely unsuccessful.

Rather than concentrating on Echoes, Microsoft would have a better chance of eliminating phone numbers with “voice dialing.” It would involve speech-enabling the contact list, associating multiple “namespaces” (meaning phone numbers, IM user names, aliases on social networks, etc.) with an individual’s identity and then replacing dial-tone with a spoken prompt like, “what’s up?” Users could respond by saying “call Dan” and have it look up “Dan” in a local or network-based directory and then prompt you through any disambiguation that you might require (e.g. “Do you mean ‘Dan Miller?’ Do you want to call him at work, home or on his wireless?…).

By the way, this is a major part of Tellme’s long-standing vision of Dialtone 2.0. It provides a model for using telephones (including softphones embedded in IM clients or Web browsers) more like a voice portal, capable of carrying out searches, delivering information or connecting with friends or businesses. No need for telephone numbers.

Whose Idea Was the Number for Life
Single-number service is almost 10 years old. For instance AccessLine Communications (now owned by Telanetix) has been plying its Find me/Follow me service since 1998. There are many others, including One Box, ephone and single number offerings from incumbent phone companies, like Bell Canada, Telus and even Comcast.

It has garnered a certain amount of appeal with geeks and road warriors, but not mass appeal. Number portability has proven to be more important. Rather than fostering yet-another-personal-phone-number, people like to keep the numbers they already have. They are less apt to change to something else without a specific benefit. I, for instance, signed up for a Grand Central number when it first launched. I still have it. But I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what it is, even though single-number access to me at home, mobile, office or VM would solve a lot of problems in my life.

The Challenge: Speech-Enabling Self-Maintained Metadata
Microsoft’s approach with Echoes assumes that a carrier will maintain “network address book” (NAB) with rules and protocols developed to ensure that it contains the most recent listings from multiple sources. Sprint PCS, for one, has long offered a mechanism for subscribers to upload and “sync” their contact information, without too many takers. Meanwhile almost every social network and search service provider has figured out how to mine contact information from multiple address books on a person’s PC. It’s all transparent.

It seems to me, and I’ve heard Bill Gates say as much, that an approach that speech enables simple commands for e-mail management (read, forward, delete…) as well as for initiating phone calls would go farther toward eliminating phone numbers (and email addresses for that matter) than establishing a platform in the cloud that aggregates and syncs metadata from multiple sources. That being said, a truly useful platform for command and control of such “unified communications” will have to do both.

Dan Miller is Senior Analyst with Opus Research

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