John over at Daring Fireball looks at the corporate computing experience, and is disgusted at what he sees; e-mail sucks, and expectations for reliability are low:

There’s no reason every CEO in America shouldn’t expect the company’s computers to work as well as their toilets. Companies that aren’t in the computer industry shouldn’t need large staffs of full-time IT staff any more than they need large staffs of full-time plumbers.

Every company I’ve worked for has either used some kind of non-standard e-mail client (e.g. Outlook, Lotus Notes) for interoffice e-mail. Everyone one of them sucked in the terms of reliability, and required huge staffs of people to run the servers. At my wife’s job, she has to contend with TAO, which is total crap (the webmail interface is a total abortion, as it only works on IE 5/6 on Windows).

Why the world can’t just use a combination of IMAP, SMTP, and LDAP is beyond me.