Does B come before A?

One of the really cool things about working on a Mac is that you avoid all the hazzle that PC users have - usually with Outlook.

However, lately I have found that there are actually some quite cool applications being released that only work on PC’s with Microsoft Office on them. Why? For one simple reason: Because they go in and fix some of the things that Microsoft haven’t provided properly for in the standard version.

Examples of such applications are Xobni and the now available ClearContext. Two apps which I think it would be cool to play with and perhaps use on a day to day basis - if I only had a PC with a more or less flawed Outlook client on it.

This has me wondering: Is it really sometimes necessary to want B in order to say A? And should you?

(I for one am not switching - cool applications or not).