My alma mater Mizzou is embarking on an interesting run… From an article that a friend pushed my way, they’re going to be engaging in a trial of using windows live webmail for all the students – basically outsourcing the email to Microsoft. The article has more details, but it’s definitely interesting.
I’m not sure myself what I would think of that. For a short while, I even ran the mail system there – it ran on my unix machines before they made a whole-hog migration to using exchange for students. Its no easy task, there’s no doubt.
For all the lockin potential, I suspect they won’t get all that much business over a longer period of time. They’ll be competing with Yahoo and Google – and frankly already are. I expect almost every student has a seperate email account simply because of the administration’s policies and the student’s desire to “do their own thing”.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out though.
Rhonabwy 
Hmmm… interesting indeed. Not all that long ago I read in various places that Microsoft was trying to partner with over 200 schools and universities to provide email. I guess the Google partnership with San Jose State got Microsoft worried.
Not sure how I feel about that either……
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