Automatically moving marked mails?

[Greg A. Woods]

At Fri, 3 Jul 2009 09:25:06 -0500, Gary Mills <mills at cc.umanitoba.ca> wrote:
Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
> 
> There's pressure here too to move from Cyrus to Microsoft Exchange.
> It seems to be coming from administrators rather than students.
> 
> Is there someplace an unbiased comparison of the two?  I see lots of
> negative reports about Exchange, but they mostly come from people who
> are using another product based on open standards.

The thing to do, perhaps, is as good a cost-benefit analysis of various
features against licensing, hardware, and support costs.

A somewhat useful example of such analysis, though quite a bit has to be
inferred because of the nature of its authorship, and it is somewhat
dated now, is the report about the conversion away from FreeBSD when
Hotmail was taken over by Microsoft and (eventually) moved onto
Microsoft products.  I suspect this venture cost Microsoft much more
than they were even able to admit to themselves, let alone what we as
outsiders can guess.  Personally I believe that Microsoft knew it would
be critical for them to acquire a large Unix-based internet service and
convert it over to M$ products just to prove to the world (and perhaps
themselves) that it could be done, and the fact that many of the
documents about this conversion were leaked and/or published is in fact
evidence supporting my theory.  This Hotmail conversion process now
provides the background material for all the current conversion guides
M$ uses to sell customers and potential customers on the idea that it is
feasible to convert from open (and "free") systems to closed, licensed,
systems.

If M$'s documents about their Hotmail conversion actually sway you
toward using M$ solutions, perhaps you should also read the famous
"Microsoft Halloween Papers".

I suppose for folks without reasonably extensive systems programming
experience the value of an open-source based system is much more
difficult to assess.  Part the question is about control, and part of it
is about capitalism and profiteering (which of course usually requires
control to be taken away from users and held tightly by those hoping to
profit from the services and/or products they sell).  Can the
elephantine behemoth of Microsoft really provide cost advantages to all
their users because of their size and control, or is it just evidence of
how well they are able to control the market and profit from it?

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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