Microsoft charges around $15/user/month for:
- Exchange Online (email/calendaring/address books)
- Office Communications Online (presence/instant messaging)
- Office Live Meeting (Web conferencing)
- SharePoint Online (shared spaces/workflow management)
- Exchange Hosted Services (email archiving, spam and malware filtering)
Microsoft will have difficulty maintaining its online pricing at this level:
- The underlying costs of providing equivalent functionality are much less. Third parties using other code bases will compete.
- Google is developing a rich competitive offering (though Web only) at a significantly lower price point.
- Cisco will soon offer a hosted-Exchange-equivalent service, via its PostPath acquisition. Cisco may be able to charge less because it's using non-Microsoft code. Whether Cisco will be able to offer AD federation remains an open issue.
Our best guess is that come 2013, normal industry prices for hosted Exchange/SharePoint/malware control/archiving/instant messaging will be $2 to $3/user/month. If that's so, this is likely to have a serious and adverse effect on Microsoft revenues.
... David Ferris and Nick Shelness
One Comment
This is interesting given we would charge about $9 for this (less Sharepoint).
I can’t see it going this low, that is $2-3, mainly because all of the credible providers have license agreements with various anti-virus, anti-spam, image filtering etc vendors that can take a dollar or so per seat.