Palm Pre is Exchange sync based

Microsoft now has monopoly control over the standard for corporate data synchronization:

Ars talks to Palm at CES, gets under the hood with the pre

... The device supports over-the-air Exchange ActiveSync for contacts, email, calendar, and tasks. 'We use EAS at Palm, so we live and breath and eat it.'...

This has more than a few implications. See my Gordon's Notes rant on the big problem.

It means, among other things, that a huge amount of the value of a smartphone is whether or not it will be granted access to the corporate Exchange server. It also means that it's rather hard to image anything but Exchange server at the heart of any modern corporation ...

But now I digress into Gordon's Notes opinion territory.

Incidentally, does anyone know of a vendor preparing a utility that would be installed on a PC and would

1. Read/write Outlook data.
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2. Provide a local Exchange ActiveSync service so one could connect to the machine via TCP/IP and sync that way?

Update 6/10/09: See comments for some useful definitions. For example, old ActiveSync is now called "Outlook Anywhere" and it's implemented as Outlook-style RPC over HTTPS. This page provides Outlook-centric implementation details and links to Microsoft references.