What's New About Chandler?
Mitch Kapor made a post to try and better describe Chandler, partly in response to a lame WIRED article. My post below is in response to what Mitch had to say, but even more so to a point Ari Pernick makes in the comments section. So go read that stuff before continuing.
Ari makes a good point. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the object model and the way Outlook exposes its data seems cumbersome at best for the types of information management and sharing envisioned in Chandler. Despite its size, there are actually a lot of things you simply can't control or change with the Outlook object model. Not to mention that it is Windows OS centric. Even though my primary platform is Windows 2000, I want data formats, languages, tools, and standards that work on other platforms.
In addition, like most of the Office apps, Outlook has defaults that seem broken to a lot of people, designing new views, writing scripts to manipulate data, etc. is just not easy enough. Perhaps, because the default language to do scripting is VBA.
How many people have ever selected the Tools->Forms->Design a Form menu item? Chandler is probably going to have to duplicate that functionality, but Outlook users don't even know it exists or why they might care. Fewer people still have probably seen the Outlook object model docs or a book about the subject. There is a reason MS sells a pro version of Office and that people can make a living at building "enterprise apps" on top of Outlook/Office.
But the biggest problem with comparisons between Outlook and Chandler might be that Chandler is embracing a much larger set of goals. It will support data and document types that Outlook considers outside its scope. From the start Chandler is supposed to support group interactions which Outlook only has minor support for, unless of course, you have an Exchange server.
It may also be accurate to say that if you only want the out-of-the-box, single user, single machine, basic email, contacts, calendar, and tasks of Outlook or a similar app and that you are already happy with that app, then Chandler might have nothing to add because you would never use the extra features.
Of course Chandler is a platform, not just an app, so that too will take time for people to digest and accurately compare to Outlook/Office as a platform. Hopefully, people won't curse Mitch and the OSAF when they use Chandler the way they sometimes (okay, maybe often) curse Bill, Clippy, and MS if they use Outlook.
2:31:29 PM 
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