Or even better, Lotus Notes. Ick! What will save us from that hell?

Apparently the 8.5 client sucks slightly less, but I can't get that til I upgrade to Leopard.

yes actually i do. and no, no one cares what email client i use

name three real companies where every employee is FORCED to use outlook

In non-software companies the applications on the desktop are centrally managed and it's just not possible to use workarounds that engineers would find acceptable.

If I was forced in the workplace to use it, I'd quit. Same with IE6. If a company forces you to use either of those, they're clearly not going to be around very long.

Like it or not, Outlook and Exchange are still the best-in-class solution for enterprise messaging, which is why they're used. If you can't understand why that is, then I hope you've never worked in an enterprise. Perhaps you'd prefer Lotus Notes?

I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any means; I have a Mac and use Gmail every day. But being able to put aside one's biases and pick the right tool for the job is the difference between an IT professional and a zealot.

BTW I would rather change career than become an "IT professional".

Obviously, practically none of this is stuff you can't find elsewhere. But if you know of a single other offering as complete as Exchange, I'd love to hear about it. And perhaps the biggest point of all: extensive integration with Active Directory, which is the directory service of choice in a huge percentage of enterprises.

It is just like creating a beast with 800 heads, which will kill anyone that touches it. The result is that every one of the services you mentioned is poorly implemented in Exchange.

The real solution is to use open standards to create applications in each of those areas that can really solve individual problems. That is how software that really works is created. Thanks to M$, we are far away from a decent solution in these terms.

Integration is not a bad thing. If you don't like the way Microsoft does it -- whether it be the quality of their implementation, or their disregard for standards compliance, or whatever -- that's cool, and I don't even disagree. But business decisions are made based on the bottom line, not on ideology. If Exchange meets the business requirements, and is cheaper to administer than a hodgepodge of other technologies, pragmatically it just doesn't matter if it doesn't implement IMAP exactly to spec.

I'm not a big fan of MS, but they're just giving the market what it wants here. If you can do better, please do.

Trying to build all those services yourself using open source options, tying them all into an LDAP server, is an amazing pain. Does everyone need all of that? No. But honestly I can't imagine trying to handle the mail, shared mailboxes, messaging, scheduling, booking resources (conference rooms, equipment, etc..) for a Fortune 500 using the other options I'm aware of.

It may be "blather" to you, but it's generally pretty important stuff for a large company.

Sorry, I really would like to agree with you, but there are plenty of companies with IE6+Outlook worker bees that show no signs of dying anytime soon.