1.5 Million Australian Students Dump Outlook/Exchange for Gmail

This has been dubbed as the biggest gmail deployment to date.  The New South Wales Department of Education & Training will dump the Microsoft Outlook/Exchange Duo for gmail as their email platform.  This is not the first move by educational institutions switching away from Microsoft products to the more streamlined Gmail platform.  Macquarie University in Sydney did the same thing in Sept 2007.  Five US colleges have adopted Google Appes and several others in Ireland, Israel, and Japan.

Hosted applications has been creeping up over the past few years.  Quite possibly becoming the transition between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.  Web 2.5 anyone?

Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange product suite package is a very important revenue stream for the giant.  These are big blows to their bottom line and just compounds how much of a threat Google is to their software arsenel.  It also shows the disgust of Microsoft’s licensing platforms.  If an alternative solution that cuts the expenses by at least 2 or 3 fold then Microsoft seriously has to revamp their business model.