Further still, they’re touting the fact that the OWA now has all of the features the regular Outlook desktop does!

Does this not strike anyone else as a move that would make Windows (and Office, particularly since itself and OpenOffice will by then both have full ODF compatibility) completely obsolete? Why would you pay for a Windows 7 site license, when you can upgrade your Exchange server to 2010, replace all of the Windows machines with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Firefox 3.1 and OpenOffice, and save your company thousands of pounds?

On top of this, they’ve supposedly tuned 2010 to be ‘less bursty’ in the way that it accesses the disk, as well as adding JBOD concatenation support. Does anyone else see that as ‘Please virtualise your Exchange servers’? Yep, so did I.

I suppose you could be running HyperV, but with Microsoft supporting iterations of Windows Server under RedHat Xen virtulisation, I really don’t see how they’re going to convince people to pay for their the majority of their bread-and-butter products, once Exchange 2010 débuts.

What’s next? Windows 7 released under the Microsoft Public License? Perhaps they’ll just call it ‘Windows Azure Client’ when they give it away for free…