[wright]

> If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.

Counter-exhibit 1: Vista.

Apparently the MS development process makes it almost impossible to get anything done within the bureaucracy these days.

Their best results are from their research groups (e.g. Haskell) but those are people paid to work on what they want to work on anyway.

You can't just assign developers randomly to something and get the same results.

In fact, given Outlook's bugs and lack of functionality in these areas you could make a pretty compelling argument that, despite their knowledge of its internals, those are about the last people you'd want to put in charge of making Outlook work. They already got their shot and look what happened!