Of course they need large scale manageability. What the GP post said was that there are no tools that offer the facilities that AD and GP do on Windows. You can do a whole lot of stuff with scripts and other tools, but that doesn't mean it's as straightforward.

The real strength of GP is the ability to modify the way the software that runs on top of Windows works, not just the OS itself. Of course, MS offers the best support for that in things like Office, although other applications can be managed too. With the sheer variety of mechanisms for configuring applications on Linux, there can simply be no equivalent.

Offer me a working equivalent of GP, and an Exchange replacement, and I'll give it serious consideration. Until then, for me, it's just not worth the hassle.

Sounds like you're describing Iain M. Banks' post-scarcity Culture (I'm sure there are other sci-fi examples). That can't really happen until we have an abundance of energy and the ability to manipulate matter to create any material goods we may require. I don't see that happening for another millennia or so, assuming we last that long.

Perhaps that's true. However, I've never clicked on a single ad in any of my apps. I don't use an adblocker, I just don't click on ads. So they'd make more money from me by providing a paid for app. Plus they'd piss me off less.

That's not always possible. There are a few apps that I use where there isn't a version without the ads. I'd happily plonk down a few quid to remove them, but the option isn't there.

This is clearly made up nonsense. We didn't have a summer in the UK this year.

I would agree. My point was that people compare a simple IMAP/calendaring solution with Exchnage and think that it competes on the same level. If all you need or want is that, then great, go for it. If you want more, there's nothing else out there that compares.

I wouldn't disagree with that either, although what constitutes a beefy server is not an exact science, and with VM's, not that difficult to deal with. Keep in mind that most of Microsoft's recommendations for minimum specs on these sort of things, and Exchange in particular, far exceed the sort of numbers you'd be looking at with most small businesses. The real complication with 2010 as I see it is that the old style clustering is no longer supported, making a simple failover pair a pain in the arse. But, the hosted services can serve as a backup in that situation, and for many small business, hosted services may be all they need at all.

Have you ever run Exchange? Or are you just repeating the same tired bullshit that used to be bandied about 10 years ago? We've been running it for 10 years. Not once have we had to rebuild a mail store. If you're going to take a pot shot at it, at least try something a bit more up to date.

The sad thing is most people that haven't used Exchange just see it as a mail server. It's not. If they understood that better, they might understand why there are no viable alternatives.

Name one. Just one.

Agreed. I'm firmly of the opinion that widespread BYOD is a disaster in the making. You're still going to have to provide your staff with the tools and resources to do their daily work, but now you have to do that on any number of different and incompatible systems. Ignoring the potential security implications, supporting that in any meaningful way is going to be extremely hard. And you can be damn sure that laptops with Windows 8 will be one of those devices, so no, it's not irrelevant.

Fair enough (I work in the academic environment myself, so I know some of the issues). You make a reasonably strong case for it. If you've discussed the issues with them, and they're not listening, then you should take it up with your manager. If your work is being affected, you have a good reason to do so.

You may be unlucky of course, and truly have a bunch of arseholes in IT. It happens. Frankly I try my best to help whenever I can, but sometimes there are good reasons not to do something that aren't immediately obvious to the end user. It's sometimes a technical one, but just as often a politcal one.

As someone who manages an Exchange environment, I'd like to point out that I've not enabled the IMAP service. I have good reasons, and they're nothing to do with being incompetent or intentionally setting out to annoy Linux users (not that we have any, other than me). I'm sure if running an IMAP service was an actual business requirement, your IT department would have done it.

So, unless I was buying a tablet specifically to play high end games on, why would I want to spend money on CPU cores that are going to sit there doing nothing? Surely a dual core CPU is a better move?

People didn't want Linux netbooks, because they couldn't run the applications that they wanted on them. That's why so many were returned, and Linux quickly disappeared from the netbook scene. Why would you think it would be different this time around?