You're right. Suggesting that Gmail is merely an enterprise-quality mail system is crazy. It wipes the floor with every other enterprise mail system I have ever used.
Compared to utter shit like Army Knowledge Online, sure, it's great.
google mail for apps has still a long way to go to be real enterprise quality. but then again, it's simplicity to maintain and relatively low cost IS much more attractive than maintaining your own enterprise system.
Gee thanks what I always wanted, my mailbox to take half the day to open
yes, Exchange does have a lot more configurability which is needed in large enterprises.
but no, it is not "good" as far as the users were concerned - I had usability complaints very often, of the kind that my gmail users now don't have. Gmail is better now, and perhaps Exchange is too - but I have the impression that the problems people had with it are deeper than a UI revision.
I also don't understand what usability complaints users would have, since for the most part, they access it through a client such as Outlook. Are you talking about the web app? If so, then it's been updated quite a bit since then. There's still a preview site available here http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/try-more-products which has a trial of the hosted version. Is it the connectivity or some feature?
Disappearing & reappearing emails through outlook. (And occasionally disappearing and not reappearing; Had something to do with ActiveSync and outlook open at the same time, but I never quite managed to exactly characterize it). Despite exchange's hyper configurability, those disappearing and mostly reappearing messages did not have anything in their logs different than anything else.
Also, search was abysmal.
Larger mailboxen (3-4 GB at the time) caused huge slowdown, and people were moving stuff to local (though, not backed up!) archives sorted by quarter, so that the recent year or so would perform reasonably.
> But you're comparing a service in 2012 to one in 2006.
I'm comparing Exchange at 2006 (I think it was Exchange 2005? but it might have been Exchange 2003; It was the latest available at the time) to Gmail at the time. Everyone preferred gmail to outlook web access, and most preferred it to Outlook as well (for tags, search and predictable behavior).
I'm sure Exchange has improved since, but so has gmail. What can exchange 2013 (or exchange 2010, which is the recent battle-tested version, unlike 2013) do that that Exchange 2005 couldn't?
Exchange is pretty horrible to administer.
Google also does email search better than anything on Exchange, and the web ui is better.