Since the assumption is that MS costs more, I thought I'd dig up some links to prove/disprove that. I learned that MS actually provides hosted Exchange services

Since the assumption is that MS costs more, I thought I'd dig up some links to prove/disprove that. I learned that MS actually provides hosted Exchange services, which is more of an apples-to-apples comparison with Gmail: http://www.microsoft.com/online/buy.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/online/buy.mspx From that link, there was a "Microsoft Online Services Cost Estimator" (http://www.microsoft.com/online/estimator/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/online/estimator/default.aspx). I input 30,000 users for Exchange and it estimated $228,000/month. If we assume that the $7.25 million was for 5 years, then Gmail for 30,000 users costs only $120,833/month, which is theoretically $1.3 million/year less than MS hosted Exchange. For some context on how much of a big deal this is or isn't, according to the LA city budget (http://budget.lacity.org/ http://budget.lacity.org/), their total IT budget is about $100 million/year.