I thought most companies had pretty much stopped buying hardware phones and switched to soft phones to reduce costs. We've been using Cisco soft phones (Jabber) for years. It's not perfect but good enough. Users can customize ringer devices and volume.
Eh, I really depends. I think softphones are great if you use the phone infrequently, or if you use the phone so often that you always have a headset on. If you use the phone a several times a day for really short periods using a softphone is a pain.
That's not even taking the average age of the employee into account. I worked at a place where the average employee was probably 45 or so.
