SynApps The Open Source and Gadget blog

Microsoft's Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president for Microsoft Office Live and Microsoft Exchange, stated that his group is working hard on finally getting Exchange Version 14 (!) to run properly in large-scale SaaS installations, according to an interview with TechCrunch.

Boy, that was about time after years of trying to sell Exchange through hosters and telcos - with limited success due to the inherit limitations of the decades old architecture of Exchange. 

We have built Open-Xchange on top of open, proven Internet technologies that scale like hell, integrate well and are virtually impossible to break. The whole Internet with it's 180m WebSites and 1.8bn hosted eMail accounts runs on this stuff. Exchange 2007 runs 500.000 hosted accounts and Microsoft is proud that the new Exchange 14 beta is tested by 3.5m users - up from a mere 5.000 (!) testers of Exchange 2007.

Microsoft is a dwarf compared to the open Internet world - and will remain one if it doesn't open up. The age of proprietary, closed mail servers and database back-ends is over. Internet Architecture rules, and it rules us at Open-Xchange.

Even if Microsoft puts every buck and dime into getting Exchange right this time they will never get to where the open source piping of the Internet infrastructure already is. No indiviual company can do this. Instead, building on top of these technologies like we do, Google does, Amazon does, Apple does, everybody that had a choice does - will always outperform single vendor proprietary solutions.

Oh, and did I mention that we scale 10x over Exchange - guess why ;-)

PS: Steve, get well soon!