Right. So imagine if you have two or more monitors, and the one with the taskbar is two or three feet away from where your focus is. The little blinking square is hardly noticeable then, especially if you rarely use the taskbar (and how would you if you have four screens, it will give you RSI just mousing over there every time).
There is one semi-cheesy third-party app which adds more obvious notification, but as it stands, email arriving in Outlook is way easier to see than IMs in Lync, even though Outlook knows all about your Lync conversations, including when you are missing one (i.e. it quietly puts the chats you are missing into your Missed Conversations, even while it is notifying you with a big popup about incoming emails). In 1999 AOL IM would just pop up the chat window on your screen where you could see it.
There is one semi-cheesy third-party app which adds more obvious notification, but as it stands, email arriving in Outlook is way easier to see than IMs in Lync, even though Outlook knows all about your Lync conversations, including when you are missing one (i.e. it quietly puts the chats you are missing into your Missed Conversations, even while it is notifying you with a big popup about incoming emails). In 1999 AOL IM would just pop up the chat window on your screen where you could see it.