This. Microsoft was very aggressive in courting CIOs and senior management, and had a great sales team.

I remember hearing that they had a storage calculator spreadsheet that would allow you to calculate how many IOPS you'd need from your storage to deploy Exchange.

Everyone I knew working with Notes or other products was gobsmacked. Why would you need that? Just buy decent storage. Nobody outside of the Exchange world cared about IOPS, unless you were dealing with of high thousands of users on one machine/cluster.

But the Exchange Server storage layer was a total dog's breakfast. (And not a healthy dog, either.) So disk performance was much more important for them.

And that spreadsheet was like crack for the senior management layer. They suddenly got to play with the numbers of users, mails per hour, mailbox quotas - then feel like they had involvement. They had input. They could go to their storage vendors with those figures and speak authoratitively about their requirements.

Those vendors would humour them, and sell them the exact same array that everyone else was buying for that capacity requirement and budget.

But Microsoft had turned a weakness into a strength, by making the managers feel like they had real input into the process.

Honestly, that spreadsheet was a genius move that it took me years to understand.