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Comment by ndespres | Hacker News Reader

It did fill a gap for a while unmet by a lot of services that we take for granted now. A Mac Mini with macOS Server to host email, calendar sharing, file sharing, and Time Machine backups went a long way towards meeting a small office's IT needs. It's mostly supplanted by things like Google Workspace, Office 365, Dropbox, and proper MDM solutions these days, but wasn't a bad choice up through maybe 2014 depending on the situation.

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Even as early as 2008, it didn’t make sense for a small company to host their own e-mail servers. Hosted Outlook was a much better choice.

My memory of the hosted Outlook/Exchange landscape of that time is much more negative. It was expensive, had inconsistent or costly support for ActiveSync devices, had no integration or federation with existing on-premise Active Directory solutions, management consoles of shared/hosted Exchange providers were difficult to administer. Broadband was much more limited, so remotely-hosted mailboxes were a hassle.

By 2009 at least, iPhones supported hosted ActiveSync. I was writing field service software (“sending people places to do things”) for ruggedized Windows Mobile devices. I do seem to remember some of our customers using ActiveSync from hosted Outlook for emails alongside our software.

Hosted exchange was kinda expensive and slow until Microsoft started competing directly from my experience.

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