Comments on: Gaps found in Microsoft Exchange API documentation

Companies providing alternatives to Exchange are expressing concern over missing information in recently published APIs for Microsoft volume server products.

[TheSmellyMoa]

Clue: Microsoft Wants Competitors to Die

It's primary directive is the desertification of the entire computing landscape - nothing but Microsoft products as far as anyone can see, a vast, chaotic blue screen that spans the planet and destroys the productivity of every living human being at horrific dollar cost to everyone and every enterprise.

As far as MSFT is concerned, all email systems must run on Exchange, or be destroyed.

[Penguinisto]

It's okay. They're losing.

Seriously - their marketshare is eroding on all but one front (Office). Their new flagship product (Vista) can't even compete with the popularity of their old flagship product (XP). They're about to go into debt in a desperate bid to keep Google from stomping them into irrelevancy on the Web front. In gaming, what should have been their first year of semi-profitability for the Xbox is still a massive debt, and now they're losing their collective butt in marketshare to Sony and Nintendo. Their feeble attempt at challenging the iPod (Zune) is instead a complete disaster, fading into death. Even their mobile/smartphone endeavors, which they spent ten years' work to gain a foothold in, were shattered in less than 9 months by the iPhone.

Their only recent product that hasn't been regarded widely as a disaster? Office 2k7 - a tepid upgrade with a re-arranged menu.

The only thing that hasn't killed them entirely is inertia and heavy vendor lock-in (both of which are showing signs of erosion).

Quite simply, their options are two: Stand Pat, or Fall. I'm thinking that the latter has begun.

/P

[Seaspray0]

EVERY company wants this

Name a company that doesn't want to do better than its competitors. DUH! EVERY company wants to dominate their market. That's called competition. If you believe otherwise, then you have a very narrow view of the real world.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Microsoft should give away all their secrets

I find it funny to think that companies complain because Microsoft won't give away all their secrets to the public.

*WHY* should they give out all their information? Especially to a competing company in that particular product field?

I wasn't aware that requiring Microsoft to give away its proprietary secrets was a right guaranteed by the US Constitution. Hmm.

[Penguinisto]

API's != secrets.

Source code is a secret. Sales techniques are secrets.

API's are not secrets - they are hooks into the OS by which applications can access its functions.

[i]"I wasn't aware that requiring Microsoft to give away its proprietary secrets"[/i]

Count yourself lucky. By all rights, Microsoft should have been broken up after their conviction for monopolistic anti-trust practices in the late 1990's.

/P