… we knew you so little!
Microsoft today announced the discontinuation of EBS as a product. Sales will stop on June 30th.
It could be argued that EBS was a flop, unlike it’s “little” sibling SBS which is a raging success. EBS seemed like a stretch looking back on it. It tried to do things that medium/large enterprise administrators hate. It tried to squeeze as much functionality as possible into a 3 or 4 server package. Many of the potential companies who were in the target market already had invested in multi server architectures for one reason or another. They preferred to pick and choose the components and deploy them as and when required. The all-in-one-package bundle isn’t as suitable for these medium sized companies as it is for the SBS customer.
The real target market was always going to be small and the complexity in building this package was huge, especially when you consider all of the different product groups and time lines involved.