I must admit that I've thought about this as well. The stock price on Nortel has been so low for so long, that there has to be pressure on the board to figure come up with a strategy. Selling at a premium to the street, and getting back some of the lost value would be an obvious one.

All of that said, I don't think this would be a good deal for Microsoft. The MS pitch has been "Voip as you are", and run MS OCS & Exchange Software on top of whatever hardware platform you have. This is the way they won the server space, this is the way they won the desktop, I think it's the way they can win voice. Buying a PBX vendor only puts them at odds with their some of their biggest potential customers (the PBX Vendors). Frankly I can't see Microsoft slugging it out with PBX and network hardware companies like Avaya, Cisco, NEC, etc ... it's so, well, undignified :-)