“Thunderbird does not offer an equivalent comparison to Microsoft Office Outlook,” Microsoft said in a statement. “Customers expect much more than simple calendaring and the ability to send and receive e-mails. The integration of Exchange and Outlook far outweighs any feature that Thunderbird may deliver, and we don’t see it as being applicable for serious business use.”
— a Microsoft spokesman, here
That’s funny. Every company I’ve worked for has used some vastly over-engineered system for e-mail. At IBM, we had Lotus Notes1; everywhere else, we used Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. Despite the fact that both huge products had a metric assload of features, what did people do 99.5% of the time?
Simple calendaring and e-mail. That’s it.
No one used the voting options2 or built special applications in Outlook using Visual Basic, or managed or tracked projects through the todo lists, journal or other hullabaloo that is stuffed into that corpulent, bloated piece of crap. No one wanted to touch Visual Basic, because that would mean enabling scripting, and, as we all know, scripting is very, very bad when it comes to spam from Vietnam that, without notice, could send e-mail stating “I WANT PR0N! NOW!!” to everyone in your address book.
As for Notes, it was interesting, and there were lots of nice applications written in it, but it was painful and slow to use during my tenure at IBM. I often wondered if the old-time-IBMers who complained that “we should have never left our 3270 terminals” were more right than not. After all, those applications, albeit a pain in the butt to learn, worked fine. But I digress.
So. People just want to read and send e-mail, and maybe occasionally reserve a conference room3. Oh, and the contacts list came in handy sometimes. That’s about it, really.
The next time a Microsoft spokesperson comes around bloviating, making claims that “customers expect much more”, ask him to show you the customers — Microsoft notwithstanding — that are using more than just the basic features. You’ll have just enough time to set up a Linux box with a decent mail server and IMAP mailbox access in the time it will take for him to invent a response.
By the way, this message comes on the heels of my first brush with spam infiltrating the confines of my work e-mail. I have been forced to install SpamBayes with the Outlook AddIn to counteract it. Had I been using Thunderbird, I would have already had a decent spam filtering system in place with no effort on my part. But, remember, it’s “not applicable for serious business use”.
1 a.k.a. “Blotus Notes”.
2 I’ve tried using the voting options on e-mail. It’s stupid, because the only way people can even see the voting buttons is to double-click on a message and read it in a separate window. Since the majority of users read their e-mail in a preview pane, they never see the buttons, so they reply to the message and write their one-line response. Oh, and don’t get me started about document reviews with Microsoft Word and Outlook.
3 At my current place of employment, IT has never even bothered to set up the conference rooms in the proper way so they can be added as a resource to a meeting. This is annoying, to say the least, but more grist for the mill that, even given the proper tools, some people will ignore or misuse them, which leads us back to the fact that most people aren’t clamoring for all those features, anyways. Q.E.D.