OSNews

or whatever it was supposed to be called.
didnt they work on this for the german goverment or something?

i dont think there is so much a killer app as there is a killer combo.

novell had the grip on small office addressbooks and mail systems. but they where only about the back end and used windows as the front end.

then MS slipped in their first gen exchange connection into windows, released NT and presto. hell, the exchange client was default mail client for windows until they became serious about the internet and released the combo of IE and OE. i recall playing around with it on win95. it was simple...

then came office with outlook. and then we have active desktop on win2k that plays nice in networks based around internet technologys (tcp/ip, dns) and kerberos.

the classical statement about MS still stands, embrace and extend. if you allow MS to play around with your tech you can be damned sure that they soon release something thats compatible with yours but provide extra benifits when used with other MS products.

just look at what they are doing with the xbox360.

it can play nice with both PSP and ipod. but you can be damned sure that it will play even nicer with music devices that uses that new MS tech they talked about this year.

thing is that ms makes sure to not licence stuff out unless they are sure the entity that gets the licence cant one up MS.

MS is to the corp desktop what mac is to the home desktop, a religion. that windows is on about 90%+ of the desktops in this world is that people want to run their same apps at work and at home.

while apple caters to home users with ilife (itunes, iphoto), MS goes for the kill on the corp desktop (office with outlook, exchange, active directory, even activex).

for open source to go up against MS on the corp desktop they first need to take the exchange server on. just like the article points out. basicly you need a server that can be a drop-in replacement for the combo of exchange and active directory. one that plays nice with outlook, and a host of other clients. then those that dont need to run specialized software that only available on MS systems can go with anything they want.

problem is tho that anything that open source comes up with, MS can reimplement and extend. if open source trys that, MS just picks up the extensions.