[toast0]

> Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do.

Yep, corporate GMail had made me detest email, but corporate Outlook made me stop using it.

Also, Outlook for Mac was the only app that I had to actually quit before sleeping a macbook or the battery would die in my bag. Nothing else could compare.

On the server side, nothing mutilates mail quite like Exchange, although recent versions aren't as good as that as the old ones were.

Word and Excel are kind of nice, but I don't use them enough to pay for them, so OpenOffice it is.

[josephg]

Thats nice for you. Personally I use Apple Pages to compose word documents.

But this isn't about us. The question is whether Microsoft's products add real value to their customers. From your nephew with an xbox, to devs in the C# ecosystem, to office workers who use word and excel to get their work done the answer is obviously yes.

[toast0]

> The question is whether Microsoft's products add real value to their customers.

I'm pretty sure Outlook convincing me not to read corporate mail was not of value to my employer (Microsoft's customer). At the very least, it added confusion and delay when other employees expected me to see things they emailed. Perhaps letting me focus on other stuff was of benefit to the employer, but that's tricky to measure; it's hard to imagine employers want to use a terrible email system to subtly discourage email use, there are more effective ways.