Nuance's Platform Play

Despite the positive tone of this recent press release from Nuance, it causes me to wonder just how long it will be before Scansoft gobbles up Nuance! What gives me pause about Nuance is not their core technology, as their ASR/TTS products are as good if not better than their competition. Rather, its their business model that leaves one scratching his head. It seems in recent years, instead of focusing on their core competancy (i.e. speech technology), they've spread themselves rather thin by moving up the food chain and providing a complete turnkey voice platform. Not only has this put them in a position of direct competition with many of their customers, but it raises questions about whether not they will be able to sustain the progress they've made in their core speech technologies in the past and simultaneously establish the requisite ubiquity in the marketplace they'll need as the technology becomes commoditized.

Scansoft on the other hand, at least in terms of network-based, high density speech resources, is focused on the core enabling technologies and seems much more eager to rely on third party platform partners and integrators to help plant their technology everywhere. As a consequence, Scansoft's speech server products are much easier for developers to integrate and deploy. Futhermore, Scansoft tends to be much quicker to embrace open and emerging standards, such as MRCP, and ETSI Aurora distributed speech recognition, not to mention solid support on a wider variety of computing platforms, including Linux.

In a certain sense, the situation is somewhat similar to the classic Apple vs. Microsoft situation in the PC industry. In the early days of the PC industry Microsoft focused on the software and leveraged its relationship with "platform providers" to gain ubiquity. Apple on the otherhand, focused on being all things to everybody by offering an complete turnkey platform approach, and ultimately ended up seriously marginalized.