Nobody cares about Access and Vizio

Whatever the reasons are that they don’t include Vizio and Access aren’t really all that important. None of this is really all of that critical, because I would wager that quite a few people run Fusion/Parallels just to get the “real” MS Office. Why?

It ain’t for Vizio or Access. It’s also not for Publisher, OneNote, or any of that other crap.

It’s all about OUTLOOK. Repeat after me. I-t i-s a-l-l a-b-o-u-t O-U-T-L-O-O-K.

Entourage is the most ridiculous application I’ve ever used. It’s a direct insult to Mac users. You might as well just use Apple Mail’s IMAP client and avoid the annoying daemons and other overhead associated with Entourage. There is not real MAPI support in it. It is a bad product, including the 2008 betas I’ve seen.

At least one company has reverse-engineered MAPI to produce an Exchange server clone. If they can establish true white-room reverse engineering, Apple should buy them, and include Exchange server support in Apple Mail. Now. There’s also an open source project, but it’s barely off the ground.

What should be made very clear is this: Office is dominant because it has a critical mass of users, and it uses yet another new proprietary file format. Many people would use non-Office products if they could reliably open and use those documents in other products, especially free ones. But many of those people would still be stuck on Exchange server, just because so many companies use it and the investment is too huge just to throw away. Fine let them keep their easily corrupted JET p.o.s servers, but open it up!

If you free users from Outlook, you will free them from Office. If you free them from Office you will free them from Windows. Microsoft knows this, that’s why you have .docx and that’s why they don’t have a real MAPI client on Mac.