Locally hosted Exchange is insanely wasteful. Organizations continue to believe that a $25 lock on some closet is "more secure" than a real datacenter and insist on paying 3+ intermediaries' markup on outrageously expensive software licenses and servers, racks, UPSes and other accessories. They buy servers which they barely use, and what cost savings there is gets wiped out by VMWare licensing fees if they decide to do virtualization. Then they've got to pay another company to bring technicians out to maintain the server, change the UPS batteries, etc, at a cost of $100+/hour.
All of this could be so much more cost-efficient at scale. GMail may be a privacy concern, organizations' insistence on hosting their own email is maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wasteful considering they could get the same functionality for a few hundred bucks a year.
Someone needs to make a real open-source competitor to Exchange so people who insist on hosting their own stuff can at least stop throwing away money that could employ people on Exchange licenses. I understand that IMAP exists, but no one actually wants to use Thunderbird.
Apple's and Microsoft's business transactions(except for Bing) are upfront. You pay us this much money and you get this service. Google's is a more subtle "use this free service and we'll track your behavior and try to profit off it, if not we'll kill it".
>All of this could be so much more cost-efficient at scale. GMail may be a privacy concern, organizations' insistence on hosting their own email is maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wasteful considering they could get the same functionality for a few hundred bucks a year.
There are thousands of companies that host Exchange for you. Or you have Office 365.
>Someone needs to make a real open-source competitor to Exchange so people who insist on hosting their own stuff can at least stop throwing away money that could employ people on Exchange licenses.
Why should "someone" else waste a huge amount of their time and effort on something that you think should be done and given away for free?
Because upgrades, support incidents, and software assurance are free, and they will give me the manpower to run it all? Where do I sign up? :)
With Google, you will always be the product - and you have no choice in that matter.
There are ways to protect business computers from the Big Bad Internet too. Can you think of any? I certainly can...
But so many small business owners believe (and are reinforced by their IT consulting companies who profit from that belief) that everything must always be hosted onsite.
>Why should "someone" else waste a huge amount of their time and effort on something that you think should be done and given away for free?
For the same reason any open source software exists. It'd basically be the Outlook component of LibreOffice. And no, I'm not saying "someone make this for me for free!" I'm saying this is a gap open source has yet to adequately fill and I'd be interested in filling it.
Most of the places where I've seen this scenario had between 10 and 50 employees. There are a lot of companies in this range, and the only software company that seems to be catering to their needs is Microsoft (which is drastic overkill in functionality, complexity, and price compared to most of their needs).