There has been a lot of buzz surrounding the productivity gains that softphones can deliver. Yet most of the people I speak to still prefer to use a hard phone over a softphone. Over the last few years, those enterprise softphones now available on the market have been designed to mimic the functionality available on standard office phones. Designers have even gone so far as to make their softphones actually look like traditional desk phones: BIG, BLACK, and CLUNKY. Just mimicking the hard phone is not enough to realize true productivity gains. Softphones, along with the underlying communications architecture, should be built to be leveraged as services in an enterprise architecture. While incumbent vendors have put thought into how best to transport the bits that make up the phone call, they’ve done little to change the phone and phone call paradigm itself. Specifically: Not enough thought has been put into how employees perform their jobs and the application interactions that take place leading up to and during a phone call. The introduction of softphones has not improved the interaction between people and the phone system. The process of reading a phone number off of an e-mail or Web site, and then punching it in digit by digit into the phone remains the same. The only difference now is that a mouse is used to punch the number into the softphone, which has arguably made the task harder. People are not quite as dexterous with a mouse as they are with their fingers. Softphones are little more than pictures of telephones on the screen. Furthermore, they completely take over your screen and application focus. When it rings, the softphone jumps to the forefront of your screen interrupting what you are working on. This can easily cause accidental answering of a call followed by fumbling with a headset. Because a softphone is really just a hard phone disguised as a PC application, the limitations of the hard phone still remain. Just as you are physically tied to your black phone for the entire call, softphones keep you physically tied to your PC for the entire call.