Why Does Corporate E-mail Remain the Domain of the Big Vendors?
Category Messaging And Collaboration
Open-source is threatening the commercial prominence of almost every software technology, except e-mail and collaboration. Linux is challenging both Microsoft and Macintosh strongholds (yes, go search the blogs and you'll find many Apple enthusiasts tilting towards Ubuntu's latest release). MySQL has forced IBM, Microsoft and Oracle to answer to FOSS pricing. Apache and Firefox have become defacto standards for web technology. Eclipse has absorbed entire industries, and is the only serious competition to Microsoft's .NET tools. OpenOffice and ODF are changing the game for desktop office suites.
So, why aren't the FOSS e-mail and Integrated Collaboration Environments (ICE) seen as a menace to Microsoft Exchange or IBM/Lotus Domino?
It's certainly not for a lack of products, as there are many, well-regarded open-source solutions. I see the range of open-source e-mail platforms spread over a continuum with Open-Exchange and Zimbra on one side, and Sendmail and Postfix on the other.
Yet, when Software Development Times http://www.sdtimes.com surveyed “which open-source software is your company considering?” -- application development tools ranked #1 and e-mail and collaboration sank to the bottom. I am a little surprised at this finding, because I suspect that the readers of Software Development Times are early adapters for novel technologies, eager to test bleeding-edge applications. The history of e-mail may help explain the anomaly of corporate e-mail's commercial viability.
Unlike the development of almost any information technology, e-mail was more an accident of circumstances than the outgrowth of premeditation. Interestingly, e-mail's ancestry goes back to the very same primordial mud of TCP/IP: ARAPANET. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions http://www.ifla.org has an on-line record of Ian Hardy's historical paper discussing the evolution of electronic mail :
E-mail is nearly a generic term for an amazingly complex profusion of technologies that attempt to mirror how corporate workers communicate and interrelate. What was acceptable e-mail in the '90s would be just as out of place at today's work site as modem banks and thick-net cables.
In the current trends of corporate communication there is a hunger for an expansive array of features: journaling, clustering, shared-calendaring, integrated instant-messaging, diverse clients, etc. which are all expected to be characteristics of corporate e-mail.
And, security? It just keeps moving up the checklist. NetBSD has actually dropped Sendmail from its miscellany of authorized packages because of consistent security headaches. I mean, doesn't that seem weird when a FOSS platform bans the inclusion of an open-source e-mail icon?
From my perspective, I don't expect to see any open-source e-mail/ICE solutions challenging today's corporate contenders any time soon.
Open-source is threatening the commercial prominence of almost every software technology, except e-mail and collaboration. Linux is challenging both Microsoft and Macintosh strongholds (yes, go search the blogs and you'll find many Apple enthusiasts tilting towards Ubuntu's latest release). MySQL has forced IBM, Microsoft and Oracle to answer to FOSS pricing. Apache and Firefox have become defacto standards for web technology. Eclipse has absorbed entire industries, and is the only serious competition to Microsoft's .NET tools. OpenOffice and ODF are changing the game for desktop office suites.
So, why aren't the FOSS e-mail and Integrated Collaboration Environments (ICE) seen as a menace to Microsoft Exchange or IBM/Lotus Domino?
It's certainly not for a lack of products, as there are many, well-regarded open-source solutions. I see the range of open-source e-mail platforms spread over a continuum with Open-Exchange and Zimbra on one side, and Sendmail and Postfix on the other.
Yet, when Software Development Times http://www.sdtimes.com surveyed “which open-source software is your company considering?” -- application development tools ranked #1 and e-mail and collaboration sank to the bottom. I am a little surprised at this finding, because I suspect that the readers of Software Development Times are early adapters for novel technologies, eager to test bleeding-edge applications. The history of e-mail may help explain the anomaly of corporate e-mail's commercial viability.
Unlike the development of almost any information technology, e-mail was more an accident of circumstances than the outgrowth of premeditation. Interestingly, e-mail's ancestry goes back to the very same primordial mud of TCP/IP: ARAPANET. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions http://www.ifla.org has an on-line record of Ian Hardy's historical paper discussing the evolution of electronic mail :
The idea that network mail "just happened" was widespread among early email users. ARPANET mail, without any kind of pre-planning or developmental discussion, surged in popularity within the network community. As Frank Heart, the director of the team which built the physical ARPANET infrastructure, would later comment,
When the mail was being developed, nobody thought at the beginning it was going to be the smash hit that it was. People liked it, they thought it was nice, but nobody imagined it was going to be the explosion of excitement and interest that it became. So it was a surprise to everybody, that it was a big hit. . . .
With the advent of Ray Tomlinson's first email utility in 1971, network users suddenly discovered the attraction of communicating with one another in an entirely new social space. A unique culture of electronic interaction sprang up around ARPANET email. This email culture mirrored larger shifts in the landscape of American society, shifts which satisfied the needs of its practitioners by spurning outmoded formality, loosening cultural conceptions of seniority and rank, toppling hierarchical restrictions, and encouraging succinct directness in the exchange of knowledge.
E-mail is nearly a generic term for an amazingly complex profusion of technologies that attempt to mirror how corporate workers communicate and interrelate. What was acceptable e-mail in the '90s would be just as out of place at today's work site as modem banks and thick-net cables.
In the current trends of corporate communication there is a hunger for an expansive array of features: journaling, clustering, shared-calendaring, integrated instant-messaging, diverse clients, etc. which are all expected to be characteristics of corporate e-mail.
And, security? It just keeps moving up the checklist. NetBSD has actually dropped Sendmail from its miscellany of authorized packages because of consistent security headaches. I mean, doesn't that seem weird when a FOSS platform bans the inclusion of an open-source e-mail icon?
From my perspective, I don't expect to see any open-source e-mail/ICE solutions challenging today's corporate contenders any time soon.
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