So I've had a fairly continual stream of bad Microsoft product experiences recently (Outlook is SOOOO slow over dialup, various application crashes, etc.) coupled with a bunch of fantastic experiences with Apple (iMovie, iDVD, software development on OS X, etc.) and have concluded that I'm becoming a dyed-in-the-wool Apple user...
...Except that my company runs Exchange, and really the only viable solution to calendaring and e-mail under those conditions is Outlook. I've tried Mail using IMAP, and it gets close (you can actually receive meetings and drop them into iCal, but you can't initiate them and include anyone else, and when you "accept" the meeting your requestor isn't notified). I've also tried Snerdware's Groupcal. Again, it gets close. You can subscribe to your calendar, and that of others, and you can publish changes to your calendar to the Exchange server, but again you can't initiate meetings. I used to use Ximian Evolution with Connector under Linux, and that was tolerably good. So I'm going to try that again and hopefully it'll work.
The ironic thing about that, and I don't imagine that I'm alone. Is that I remain leashed to an entire platform because of an application that's been around for decades. Apple needs to integrate exchange support into iCal/Mail.
If I were Microsoft, or for that matter, any company, I'd be trying to build the application that people can't live without. TiVo's kinda in the same position. See Michael's thoughts on that.
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