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 content="all" /> The Entourage User's WebLog
Do you hate Entourage?
2005-12-31 • General
Owen Linzmayer wrote an excellent article pointing out the ten top things in Entourage he hated. I have to say that he's right on the money with these! the article is well researched, clealry written and not at all an example of the all too common 'Microsoft Bashing'.

Now I prefer using Entourage to all the other mail & PIM apps out there, and I could probably write (though maybe not as eloquently) a 'top ten hates' about Mail.app, Eudora, Powermail & Thunderbird, all of which I have used from time to time. Is Entourage perfect? Far from it! For my money, it's the best of the bunch, but they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. You, the user, have to make up your ownn list of priorities and decide which mail client best meets those needs.

So, why does Entourage have this many shortcomings? Don't the developers care? Is it a conspiracy on behalf of "Micro$haft" (sic) to kill the mac platform? I can state for a fact, that the developers do care. In the dealings I am privileged to have with them through being an MVP, I can testify to their commitment to Office for Mac and the Macintosh platform. The shortcomings are there because they have to continually trade off between the features they want to include and the resources they have available. You see, The MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit) is only a small group, but is has a reasonable degree of autonomy to put what they want into their products. However, they have to stand and fall by their own products and are expected to return a profit to the parent company - much like any large mutlinational organisation expects the same of it's product divisions. If the Macintosh market was as large as the windows office market then I am sure that the team would be just as large and well resourced as Office for Windows is. however, that isn't the real world and MacBU have to do what they can with the resources at their disposal. I for one think they do a terrific job.

So, thanks Owen Linzmayer for an excellent article. I hope it gets the coverage it deserves, because far from damaging entourage and the MacBU, I beleive that constructive criticism makes for a stronger product as the development team is spurred on to even greater efforts.

(Article edited 02/02/2006 to correct some glaring spelling errors!)

What do you think? Please use the 'comments' link below to let me know.
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