According to the folks at Bing Software, telephony is dead on the Mac. They say that Apple has told them that telephony is no longer of interest to them or their customers.
“Mac OSX does not support telephony applications,” ID Four officials told MacCentral (ID Four is the parent company of Bing). “Apple was petitioned during design and responded that telephony was no longer an interest to them nor their customer base. We could engineer a version with all the missing components but would never recoup the outlay, let alone show a return.”
They added that the missing component list is very long and that their cost to develop this would be over US$200,000. “There is no way we would ever recoup the outlay,” ID Four said.
Bing makes two telephonic products, MegaPhone and PhonePro, for the Mac. MegaPhone is a $49.95 screen-based telephone. It incorporates a full-duplex speakerphone and digital answering machine. PhonePro is $79.95 telephony development software that uses an icon-based scripting interface. Each one of PhonePro’s icons represents an action or function, such as picking up the phone, dialing a number, recording or playing a sound.
No telephony products are positioned as part of the “digital hub.” Seems odd. Perhaps Apple has something up its sleeve. Apple had no comment on Mac OS X and telephony.
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