The reports of Microsoft’s death are greatly exaggerated

Here's a conversation that happened at least twenty times with my startup friends in Silicon Valley when I told them I was taking the CEO role at LiveOffice:

Friend: So what does LiveOffice do?

Nick: We provide email archiving and Microsoft Exchange through software-as-a-service.

Friend: Exchange? Do people still use that?

Nick: Yeah - there are like 150 MM+ seats of Exchange out there actually and it's growing 30-40% per year.

Friend: Really? I heard Microsoft is going out of business or something on techcrunch.

Nick: Umm...

Friend: And by the way... email is pretty much dead with facebook, twitter and all.

Nick: Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'll let you get back to "mashing" things up or whatever it is that you do.

You can definitely get stuck in your own little bubble if you don't watch out.

From my experience at Symantec leading the Enterprise Vault team and now at LiveOffice, I can say that the Microsoft ecosystem and customer base around email is still alive and kicking.

Obviously Google has created a compelling alternative with Google Apps. But I've found that many customers still love the tight integration of Microsoft Outlook, Office and Exchange as well as the huge network of technologies and technologists around it.  For the thousands of SMB clients we serve, we see that users are very comfortable with Microsoft Outlook as an interface and are loathe to switch.

Personally, I still haven't found a Web-based email service that allows you to get through emails as quickly as you can with Outlook.  But I'm biased.

And sure - email will evolve over the long run and will at some point be end-of-lifed. But folks have been saying that for nearly a decade and my inbox volume hasn't missed a beat. As the famous economist John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run, we're all dead." Between now and then, I'll keep checking my Blackberry, thank you very much.

This article about a Google employee going back to Microsoft (from where he originally came) made me think about how skewed the view is between Silicon Valley ("Microsoft is dead, Google has taken over and actually is in decline because Facebook is the new king") and the rest of the world. My favorite quote (probably apt to describe much of Web 2.0 in general sadly):

"This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter."

I also thought this was interesting:

"This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications."

So in any case, we in the SaaS industry will watch with amusement as Google and Microsoft duke it out and the Bay Area writes off Redmond. Meanwhile, we'll eagerly service the "niche" 150 MM+ user Microsoft Exchange ecosystem.