Ed Brill

"Almost everybody uses Exchange, they just don´t know it"

November 21 2005

Channel9 is featuring its first-ever interview with an Exchange guy. Some great quotes in there:

"Almost everybody uses Exchange, they just don't know it"
"So far we've given developers 42 different APIs...developers have found that confusing"
"My e-mail server might be down....yup, it's down"

Yet at the end they come back and say that Exchange is stable. heh.

Seems like a lot of the "innovation" in Exchange 12 is catch-up work -- full-text search, incremental backup, typeahead addressing in OWA. All this requiring a hardware upgrade, dropping or stabilizing all existing APIs, and dropping active/active clustering. At least a year away.

As for "almost everybody uses Exchange", the speaker quotes Gartner as saying that Exchange runs more than half of all business e-mail mailboxes. I haven't ever seen a report like that.

(Thanks, Bruce)

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category: Microsoft Add/View Comments [14]

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1 Mike Brown | 11/21/2005 2:34:20 PM
"We [Exchange] handle electronic mail, we handle calendaring, we handle tasks, we handle contacts, you name it ..."

Well actually, I think YOU just named it!

Cheers,

- Mike

2 Mike Brown | 11/21/2005 2:50:43 PM
And you'll be able to force OWA to use plain text instead of HTML formatted mail.

Whatever will they think of next?

Cheers,

- Mike

3 Danny Lawrence | 11/21/2005 3:28:29 PM
"As for 'almost everybody uses Exchange', the speaker quotes Gartner as saying that Exchange runs more than half of all business e-mail mailboxes"

Typical MSFT hyperbole, I think you will agree Ed that had he said Exchange runs <i>almost</i> (r nearly) half of all business e-mail mailboxes, you would have agreed with him (the latest figures I've see you quote are about 45% Notes/Domino 45% Exchanged 10% other, right?), but in MSFT land "Plurality" (whcih still may not be the case) means "More than half"

4 Chris Whisonant http://cwhisonant.blogspot.com | 11/21/2005 3:42:11 PM
If you watch the video, the Exchange guy states 41 seconds in that "about 52 + percent of all business mailboxes are run on Exchange now".

5 Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 11/21/2005 5:10:22 PM
"If it involves what you do in your daily work ... it goes through us". Pass me a shovel, there's some bullsh*t that needs shifting. I used a couple of workflow applications today, and my own project management application that has Sametime integrated into it. Let me just check... no, Exchange wasn't involved, but I still managed to be productive today.

"The world's best personal information management store". He doesn't really believe that, does he? He should get out of that room a bit more often.

6 Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 11/21/2005 6:08:32 PM
"about 52 + percent of all business mailboxes are run on Exchange now".

Maybe that is true, a mailbox does not necessarily mean a person right? You probably need less mailboxes with Domino as you can do workflow other ways?

7 Wild Bill http://www.billbuchan.com | 11/22/2005 6:01:58 AM
"42 Api's".

{ Link }

And they're inconsistent, buggy, badly document. Rubbish in other words.

---* Bill

8 Chris Whisonant http://cwhisonant.blogspot.com | 11/22/2005 7:38:38 AM
@6 - good point Carl.

More video highlights:

- Exchange guy admits that he does NOT run Windows on his home computer. That's classic!

- Comments at channel9 site mention how fast OWA is, but he is running the server on his workstation and when asked to see it on a live server he can't access it b/c it's conveniently down for a "build upgrade"... =)

- Can they get a better video?

- He says the 3 best things in Exchange 12 are OWA, OWA, and Web Services (a day late and a dollar short with web services)

9 Chris Whisonant http://cwhisonant.blogspot.com | 11/22/2005 3:44:54 PM
Ed - it looks like they still haven't responded to your question about the Gartner report they are citing...

10 MarvinK | 11/22/2005 5:58:32 PM
I think more people use Exchange than they realize, too.

Maybe not as their primary mailbox, but I know some third-party applications use Exchange as a back end. I believe Cisco does it with their voicemail solution. Of course, I could be wrong... and maybe there's a backend that doesn't use Exchange.

11 Rob | 11/22/2005 9:44:02 PM
IBM/Lotus needs to watch the API creep too. Open standards support is great but there's a steadily climbing number of standards and object libraries to traverse and master...

12 sish | 11/23/2005 5:38:39 AM
Has this once interesting blog descended into Domino vs Exchange, User group meetings summaries and links to IBM propaganda ?

13 Randall Shimizu http://is-perspectives.blogspot.com/. | 11/23/2005 2:01:07 PM
He must have been thinking all Microsoft users use Exchange or they all use Outlook. Ergo Exchange must have 75% market share according to Bill Gates.