When I was a systems administrator for the now-defunct Dantz Development Corporation, we migrated the company from an ancient Communigate installation and no org-wide calendaring solution to an AD/Exchange environment. Exchange worked exactly as planned. It was super make fun happy go time. Unless you used OS X, that is, in which case you were out of luck.

This was back in the day when a G3 “Pismo” PowerBook was an aging but still somewhat respectable machine, and OS 9 was not yet the quaint laughingstock it now seems. While OS 9 users were pretty well-served by Outlook 2001, Microsoft had no Exchange client for OS X. Finally, Microsoft released Office X, but the execrable Entourage was no replacement for Outlook. After leaving Dantz for Apple, I had no reason to continue using Entourage, so I didn’t think much about the release of Entourage 2004 when it came out. (As an aside, it still amazes me that for all Apple’s fantastic infrastructure and intranet resources, it still has no centralized, enterprise-class message and calendaring system a la Exchange.)

When Apple pulled the rug out from under me, I jumped over to UC Davis, landing in another Exchange environment. Perhaps, I thought, Entourage had finally arrived as a full-featured Exchange client in the interim. I was sadly disappointed; Entourage 2004’s Exchange functionality is really not much more than a glorified IMAP client, and its calendaring functionality, frankly, sucks balls. Disappointed again, I pinned my hopes on the next version of Entourage, 2008.

Surely Microsoft would have finally produced an Exchange client for OS X with all the features available in, say, Outlook 2003. Right?

Yeah, right.

Think Secret’s recent article seems to have quashed those dreams pretty effectively:

Perhaps it makes sense, then, that Microsoft has to date spent the bulk of its Office 2008 Preview devoted to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with little focus given to the Mac-only Entourage… Entourage has a more polished, Leopard-friendly interface, but underneath that luster it’s virtually identical to the version that shipped in Office 2004.

I just have to wonder why Microsoft has continued to shaft OS X Exchange users for the last seven years. Lord knows nothing happens quickly in Redmond, but come on. It’s not like Microsoft doesn’t know how to build an Exchange client, and an organization of any reasonable size using Exchange is likely to have a majority of Windows workstations anyhow, so deliberately ignoring Entourage isn’t likely to generate sales of new desktop licenses to exasperated OS X users abandoning their platform of choice just to run Outlook 2003 or 2007 (though with the rise of virtualization applications like Fusion and Parallels I suppose they might pick up a few extra dollars).

So what’s their excuse? Incompetence? Sloth? Some heretofore unimagined evil plot? The folks at the MBU must be a bamboozled, deluded, and possibly self-loathing group, like Jewish Holocaust deniers for Christ, or Log Cabin Republicans. They’re working on a product line that’s grudgingly funded and/or secretly despised by their corporate overlords.

Why the fuck hasn’t Microsoft published a real Exchange client for OS X?

What the fuck is wrong with those people?