Ed Brill's comment to Richi's post yesterday prompted me to post my own view on the "scorn" over the lack of an Exchange roadmap.
I don't believe for a second that there is no Exchange roadmap in Redmond, it's simply that they have not gone public with it. I think there is a very sound reason for that - they don't want customers on older releases who still have not upgraded to Exchange 2003 to start thinking "Well, maybe I should wait until the next release.."
I can't say that I blame them...
With a significant part of their base still on older releases - particularly a large number of customers that remain on Exchange 5.5 - the last thing they need is the promises of a future release to defer upgrades.
I firmly believe that to do anything really interesting - really cool - that both Outlook and Exchange "next" will have to be post-Longhorn. Releasing Post Longhorn client and post Longhorn server, would put general availability of upgrades to Exchange and Outlook at early 2007 if I'm not mistaken.
If all my assumptions (and I emphasize that's all they are...) are correct, Microsoft is probably over-reacting to the negative impact of going public with the Exchange roadmap. Once their customers heard the magic words "post-Longhorn" I think they would realize that Exchange 2003 is it for the reasonable future and they should just get themselves in gear and upgrade already. Few people understand better than I do just how much work upgrades and migrations are, but when you're talking about a messaging infrastructure that was designed around 1996 - isn't it about time to get current?
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Exactly, E2003 is “it”, with the exception of… well, actually I think Chris is planning to blog about this soon, so I won’t steal his thunder. Once he’s added his two penn’orth, I’ll add some more thoughts about “scorn.”
I don’t see how they come back to those same customers and justify Software Assurance dollars given the zigs, zags, changes, and false starts in that “roadmap”. I would think protecting the almighty subscription revenue would be as important as getting customers to upgrade? Also, why upgrade to a product if it is a dead-end? Perhaps without announcing a next version, MS gets the benefit of the doubt that there will in fact be a next version of Exchange as we know it.
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Embargos and tongue biting