Blackmoor Vituperative

I switched from MS Office to OpenOffice.org several years ago, and I haven’t looked back. Quite simply, OpenOffice rocks. However, I still have one MS Office application installed: MS Outlook. I can tell you why in one word:

HotSync

I carry my Palm everywhere. Ever since I got my first Handspring Visor (back in the 20th century), a Palm has been an indispensible part of my life. I’d be lost without it. I currently carry a Tungsten T5, which is simply an awesome little gadget. Part of the magic that makes this machine so essential is that it synchronizes with my desktop, and my laptop, and Susan’s laptop, making it easy for all of our address books, calendars, and to-do lists to stay synchronized. This is no small feat.

While there are plenty of worthwhile alternatives to Outlook’s email capabilities (Thunderbird, for example), there is no one application that combines calendar, email, contacts, and to-do lists, which also HotSyncs with my Palm. So I am stuck using Outlook.

At the moment, the closest competitors for Outlook’s place on my desktop are Chandler, which has been under construction since 2002 and still does not have usable email or to-do list functionality, and Evolution, which might someday be ported to Windows. Someday. In the meantime, Mozilla is steadily plugging along getting Thunderbird and Sunbird to work together, but who knows when they’ll get a task manager into the mix, or manage to painlessly integrate them all and make them HotSync-able.

So for the foreseeable future, Outlook is on my desktop, and it’s going to stay there. That’s not the way I want it, but that’s the way it is.