Martin Hall, organizer of Inbox 2004 East has proposed an open forum debate about the current and future state of the messaging market during the Inbox 2004 event.

IBM's Ed Brill accepted the invitation. (There's now also an 'official version') Which is easy when you're convinced that you represent the better product.

Yesterday, Martin Hall put up a blog post that nobody from Microsoft has an answer so far.

I've had an indirect "they've declined to participate" but, it seems, nobody in the Exchange group is willing to explain why. My overtures to the group directly or even via WaggEd are going unanswered. ... Microsoft Exchange Group: Please let me know why you can't/won't join Ed Brill in an open forum debate!

To me, this looks like Microsoft is not really convinced they have the better product.

Maybe they don't want to talk about stuff like platform independence, scalability or real, proven security. Maybe they're just afraid of being asked to explain the involvement in the mess that Radicati Group got itself into recently. It's also possible that they don't want to be publically asked about their statements about product roadmaps and the concept of 'rip and replace'. Maybe nobody wants to have to explain the real intelligent design of Exchange clustering (or Microsoft 'clustering') in general.

Draw your own conclusions ...