Ed Brill

Talk about waiting to the last possible minute....
Microsoft announced today that they will extend mainstream support for Exchange 5.5 another year, to 31/12/04.  They had previously done the same for Windows NT 4.0.
I can't say I'm totally surprised.  First, I never believed MS's claims that 40% of Exchange 5.5 customers had upgraded to Exchange 2000, and neither did any of the mainstream analysts.  Second, most IT organizations tend to shy away from major deployment or upgrade projects in Q4, and Exchange 2003 just didn't ship soon enough to be deployable before the original 5.5 clock ran out.  Last, both IBM and Oracle have been using this date as a discussion point with customers about their impending need to move to something, so Microsoft has taken that off the table for the moment.
(Thanks to Ferris Research's daily news bulletin for the catch)