Communications Solutions
2000 Product Of
The Year
[Go To Product Of The Year
List]
When we assemble an awards feature as sweeping as the Products Of The
Year, we accept a task akin to creating a single, panoramic view from a pile
of snapshots. While each snapshot may seem almost whimsically particular,
focusing on one detail or another, the photos, in aggregate, must yield
something approaching a unified view. And so each product we cite is a
single view contributing to the whole, however disjointed or distorted that
whole may first appear.
While an aggregate view, a montage, may admit both discontinuities and
redundancies, it may also deliver the compensating qualities of liveliness
and immediacy, for it mimics the way eyes traverse a scene, and the way the
mind shuffles and arranges a multitude of discreet impressions into a single
image.
The impressions we have shuffled and arranged were gathered over the
course of the previous year, in briefings at trade shows, in discussions
during on-site visits, in interviews supplementing our research for other
articles, in hands-on tests, and, finally, in our review of formal
applications. These impressions traverse the communications solutions space,
from enabling technologies and development platforms, to enterprise and
customer interaction systems, to next-generation public infrastructure.
Together, these impressions resolve into a weirdly fractured but
nonetheless coherent whole, which is, perhaps, appropriate to field as
sweeping as converged communications. No single tunnel-visioned glimpse
would suffice. And yet, no eye can see everywhere at once. The compromise,
then, is to shift and nudge together the sometimes -- overlapping glimpses,
unifying a universe of particulars, delivering a "mind's eye" view
of convergence as reliable -- and as problematic -- as memory itself.
And so, without further ado, we present a picture of the year, as
constituted by the year's most memorable and significant releases, that is,
the year's most interesting new products (which by no means omits
significant upgrades to existing products). We present the Communications
Solutions™ Products Of The Year 2000.
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