[Via Ed Brill]
It hasn’t been a good few months for the Exchange product team at Microsoft. First the Outlook team ships an updated connector for Lotus Domino; then they dismantle their own roadmap; and now they are facing internal competition:
Our first product here is going to be using Outlook that uses the Hotmail e-mail infrastructure. So you don’t need to have an Exchange Server if you’re a small business; you can just use Hotmail and you can have that synchronized experience, as well as the calendaring and everything else with other people who are on Hotmail.
I suppose some could see this as a defensive move against the low-end “good enough” mail servers, especially on Linux, but it also erodes the Exchange base — at the end of the deployment spectrum where Exchange has its strongest presence. What could be driving this, I wonder aloud….perhaps Exchange+Windows 2003+Office 2003 is too costly/complicated for low-end SMB customers to deploy?
I think Ed is almost right. You need different strategies / solutions for different clients. The complexity / cost I would say is not the reason. Some SMB clients just don’t want anything to do with IT and ‘outsource’ the whole lot through these types of hosted solutions.
Talking about internal competition, IBM introduced quite some different messaging solutions over the last period. :
“Ken Bisconti is vice president of Messaging Products for Lotus software, responsible for IBM messaging software business — including Notes, Domino, iNotes, the Lotus mobile and wireless product offerings and Lotus nextgen messaging solutions such as the new Lotus Workplace Messaging offering available in Q2 2003.”
