I attended the rollout webinar today. Microsoft was going on about how wonderful the “experience” is, and how it’s HIGH DEF don’t you know, and the quality and ease of this new communication system is unmatched.
Nice job, guys. I enjoyed the experience of audio dropouts, video dropouts, and a generally disappointing experience. Hey, next time maybe ditch Silverlight and go with a technology that works! How about picking something with with a PAUSE button? That'd be clever.
Inane World 
Quit bitching or get your facts right. First Silverlight does briallant HD that scales to your bandwidth connection. It was used for the last summer Olympics and millions of people loved it. As for your complaining about the video breakup of Lync, remind me what software does work flawlessly? iTunes is one of the biggest pieces of crap ever produced, and Audible software (owned and produced by Amazon) is also total crap. Both are from top "rated" tech companies. So your complaint is that MSFT's nearly free software has not brought true television broadcasting to the desktop for under $100 – perhaps you're right. I think you are just making chicken-shit jabs at a team of software produccers, just like you used to be. You should switch to only Apple products, then you can FaceTime with…oh yeah, only ohter FT users. Oh and did I mention that people complain the quality sucks.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/office/servers/VideoGallery.aspx
For readers that want to go beyond the BS, the link above has the video from the conference. I just watched it (rather than taking anyone's word for it) and as you can see in the video, Lync worked great using just COTS (common off the shelf) webcams across the Internet. Gates was displayed in hi-def on what looks like a 100 inch screen. Have you seen Cisco, IBM or (gasp) even Apple do that? No, I didn't think so.
You can read actual jourlanism on the topic at sites like http://www.zdnet.com.au/bill-gates-launches-microsoft-lync-339307348.htm – where they don't just bash Microsoft because it is fun.
Well, yes, I admit that my griping about the rollout have little to do with Lync, which did seem to work nicely. I guess I was just really disappointed that I was unable to view the rollout of a product which seems interesting to me. I'm sure there are cases when Silverlight is brilliant. In this case, it clearly was not, hence my frustration. I have watched web presentations of other products from other companies using various technologies. Sometimes they work fine, and sometimes not. When I rolled out presentations in the past, I hoped to God that everything would go well and that I would not be embarrassed. Sometimes things didn't go well, and of course people (like me) weren't shy in pointing out my gaff. I don't feel bad about doing the exact same thing.
It seems that Lync is very interesting, and better integrated than other ad-hoc video conferencing utilities. It's more of a seamless unified communications platform than we've seen before. Will it make a big splash in the corporate markets? I'm not sure. Corporate america has a love/hate relationship with unified communications. Sure, it's neat, and people seem to like it (compliance hates it in general, but I digress). Will corporations toss out their huge investments in phone infrastructure to either replace it with Lync or upgrade to something that works with Lync? Seems unlikely. For the home market though, it might be popular.
The initial reaction was right; Lync is a busted unfunctional mess. Even as I type this I just got dropped from my Lync meeting, so now I'm sitting here listening to silence. After using this software (and Communicator before it) for many months (more than a year for certain), I want to slit my wrists. Maybe it works great if you have fibre optic connections, but in the real world of ADSL (my connection is 5Mbps) it's a joke, even for voice alone. Skype used to work excellently on 128 kbps. Unfortunately my corporation has gone full on to Lync. It's making my job very difficult.