[NCLUG] Ousting Exchange

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 12:15:52PM -0600, DJ Eshelman wrote:
>integration with standard apps.  Maybe I'm soapboxing too much here, but if
>the community wants to be taken seriously in this market there needs to be
>some serious work done on the front-end technologies to go with the very

It's always easier to win a battle for your own turf than someone elses.
Which makes it more unclear that "the community" (whoever they are) should
be taken seriously in that market.  You, of course, aren't the first person
to state that the Open Source community should be in this market, I'm
pretty sure that it's been regularly suggested for at least 5 if not 10
years.

However, it is a HUGE project.  Take a look at Chandler, which is well
funded and making very slow progress over the last few years.

>system is running at a crawl.  Microsoft is winning the battle not because
>of a superior back end- but because of their front-end!

It's more complicated than that...  They have the desktops and the
marketing and the momentum behind them.  Even if "the community" had a
complete drop in replacement for it, it would still be quite a battle to
get substantial conversion.

If it were easy to get in, one of the current solutions to this problem
would make this discussion moot.

Remember, Cobalt Micro started out as being a "small office appliance"
using Linux, and switched fairly quickly to being a web application.  They
were originally squarely targeting this market.

The first question before "how do we respond" is "do we as a community want
to respond".  The evidence I've seen so far is leaning heavily towards
"no".  In general, I feel that the "we need to be on the desktop" statement
is, while good intentioned, mis-directed.  It's probably the furtherst
distance from where we currently are, and we should probably fight for
targets that we're closer to like enterprise computing (which we still
aren't there for, IMHO).

Thanks,
Sean
-- 
 "I feel so insignificant...  Like people are laughing at me."
 "You--You ARE a clown..."  -- Bob Newhart
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability