GroupWise client vs. Outlook 2010

Let me qualify this by saying, I've worked in a variety of email clients and email systems over the years.  I've used cc:Mail, GroupWise, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Evolution, and custom in-house systems to name just a few.  So, it's not with any malice that I'm making this particular post, instead it's out of utter frustration.

Email clients should not be so convoluted as to be counter-intuitive and cause an end-user hours of wasted effort that should be intuitively simple.  So why did the Microsoft programmers decide that users of the Outlook client really only need 1 address book?  Seriously?  Have you kids never worked in or with an administrative support position before?  What Executive Assistant doesn't have more than one address book?

In GroupWise, it's a piece of cake to add an additional address book.  No special contortions to go through to find out how to do it, simply open your address book, click File | New Book and give it a name, viola, all done! And if you're looking for a particular contact, GroupWise (at least in version 8) searches all of your address books, not just one.

Outlook on the other hand has you doing mental gyrations that rival my cat's physical contortions while sleeping.  (Maine Coon kitties are large and manage to get themselves into the weirdest pretzel-y sleeping positions).  The Microsoft documentation isn't much help, instead if you need to create another book in Outlook check out the blog postings that come up in an internet search...they're much more helpful.

It makes me wonder if Microsoft ever consults their non-technical user base.  Those users for whom Office and Outlook were supposedly written. Because, from my viewpoint anyway, it sure doesn't seem like it.  The ribbons features in Office 2010 have generated more support calls than I remember for any previous releases and the complaints I've been hearing from non-technical (i.e. not IT staff) users make it clear that no one consulted them on the changes.

Reader Warning: A bit of a Rant follows

Which may be the big driver behind the moves to OpenOffice and LibreOffice.  There simply aren't that many users that need all of the extra "bulk" that's been added to Microsoft Office lately.  Maybe Microsoft should rethink the various versions of Office...have a "Lite" version for basic users of word processing and spreadsheets, a "Standard" version for office workers who need a bit more graphical capabilities, a "Pro" to be the Standard + Database functionality, and then an "Expert" for the heft that is the current version of Office Pro.  And price it accordingly, because these days it's really hard to beat free licensing.