This week, at its Berlin TechEd conference, Microsoft announced the arrival of its Exchange Server 2010 product, which the company wants enterprises to adopt widely for on-premise deployments as well as web services, and showed it working with with its Outlook 2010 email platform. Steve Elop, president of Microsoft’s Business Division, presided over the announcement, peppering the introduction of the new Exchange/Outlook offerings — a relatively expensive messaging and networking duopoly that is in place in half of networked enterprises — with citations about their potential cost savings for enterprises and enterprise-friendly features such as legal email archiving compliance capabilities. However, rather than underscoring the strengths of Exchange and Outlook, the approach called attention to the significant competition Microsoft now faces, including newer, free software offerings. Are Microsoft’s days at the heart of enterprise messaging and collaboration numbered?