SAN JOSE, Calif. — March 15, 2006 — Today at the Spring 2006 VON Conference & Expo, Microsoft Corp. will outline its vision for extending IP communications capabilities throughout Windows Live™ services to support relationship-centric communication via voice and video for consumers worldwide.

Blake Irving, corporate vice president of the MSN Communication Services and Member Platform group, will detail the company’s voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) strategy and vision for Windows Live in his keynote speech Thursday afternoon. Spring VON Expo is the largest VoIP exhibition in the world, with more than 300 companies showcasing their voice-data communications technology and products.

“Our mission with Windows Live is to deepen people’s relationships with whomever and whatever matters most to them,” Irving said. “We will get there by working closely with the whole ecosystem of telecommunications, Internet services and hardware manufacturing partners to build a complete presence- and contact-centric communications experience. Voice and video will play a critical role as a data type that brings relationships to life online, taking us from an era of black and white to Technicolor.”

Microsoft today offers customers free video conversation (integrated audio and video) powered by Logitech and free PC-to-PC voice capabilities powered by Microsoft^® technology via MSN^® Messenger. In addition, Windows Live Messenger includes one-way PC-to-phone calling capabilities in several markets that are part of a pay-for-use service provided by Verizon.

The company has seen a sharp uptick in customer use of voice and video services over the past six months, including record usage in January. MSN Messenger hosted voice sessions totaling more than 800 million minutes in January 2006. Video usage on the service is currently growing even faster than voice usage alone, with video conversation connecting customers for almost 1.1 billion minutes in January. In addition, stand-alone webcam usage totaled an additional 7 billion minutes in January.

“More than 20 million users on average are using our voice conversation service in MSN and Windows Live Messenger each month,” Irving said. “While the number is impressive, it’s only a small portion of our 205 million active MSN Messenger users each month. There is still a lot of room to grow.”

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