If they are promising the channel revenues from "migration, customisation, consulting, training, support and application development, and integration services" then it sounds like the poor customers are going to see much much bigger costs than $3 to £15 a month!

If only there was a widely used, well documented, standard way to implement these services using free software...

Yahoo botched a trial hosted Zimbra deployment at our 5,000 seat company, which is the only practical Exchange substitute, and gave our Microsoft proponents an opportunity to get in on this beta program. We'll never dig our way out now.

After we stopped paying Yahoo, it took them two months to notice, and we got a call from some junior VP who was thoroughly clueless. Their sales team didn't even know that Microsoft was already rolling out hosted services. ("Oh, it won't be ready for years.")

Everything that Yahoo touches turns to shit. I despair for Zimbra.

Microsoft's strategy seems to me to be "SaaS solutions for enterprises". Even in its online avtaar, Exchange and Sharepoint still need to be implemented and managed - meaning dedicated staff. Ready to use and non expert solutions like HyperOffice are still the best bet.

Exchange is broken. It's broken on your own hardware, and it's broken in Microsoft's data centers. Why anyone would *want* to pay money for it is a mystery.