Blame laziness, not Exchange
I work for a SMB which is growing fast (80 people last year, now 150+). We had an external provider to host our mail server. Our email client is Outlook on Windows 2000. We were in need to share contacts and calendars across the company. So, six months ago, our IT manager did is homework and he compared two solutions: one was Exchange Server and the second was OpenXchange running on Red Hat Enterprise Server. Can you guess which one was the less expensive? We made the switch to OpenXchange last week successfully. Now we host our own Exchange-like server and we are very happy with it.
Anyway, I don't think we will switch desktops to Linux any time soon just because our mail server is on Linux... Why? Because end users don't want to learn yet another tool. They know how to use Word and Excel, some had develop their own little macros and are sharing them all over the place (read "migration nightmare"). Even if we offer them a tool that read and produce 100% compatible MS-Office documents, they will not switch (except if forced to). I call that: L-A-Z-I-N-E-S-S.
This is true for the workplace and I think it is also true for home users. Don't blame lack of games or missing drivers or OEM's computers. Those are known obstacles. The biggest challenge is to change people perception and force them to be less lazy.In response to Newsforge's article: Why Linux is not mainstream
switching over to new tools, software or more aptly "migration nightmare" is a common theme all the way.You people did make the right choice. However i wonder cant we have a better way to share contact list and calendar, with or sans outlook? Well i did my part of the search and we have Gcal for an online calendar and zyb free sync service to backup and share mobile contacts and calendar. Syncing with outlook is no issue as many third party application are available. I am just hoping these guys will come up with a pro version of zyb to facilitate SOHO and SMB's.