Tom Shannon said:
Yes. I suppose having no software to choose from would, indeed, solve the problem.
Yes and no. If you love Outlook, there is Microsoft's Entourage, which is at least comparable to Outlook and better in many ways. I find iCal ok, but not wonderful. There are many information-manager products for macs. As for CRM, Daylite is much better than Act ever was, and the developers are great. Have you looked in retail stores lately? Not much software for sale, really, for any platform. At Compusa, an aisle of Microsoft products, an aisle of games, an aisle of useless crud (clipart collections, recipe programs), an aisle of tax and money software, and an aisle of "utilities." Utilities are things like spam blockers, software firewalls, spyware blockers, et cetera. Most of the latter category of products are not necessary for OS X. I also don't have dll or registry problems. And I have UNIX under the hood. So I'm happy.
But I think the deeper question is "How much does software help us get things done, and how much does it take away time, money, and energy?" We all have different points at which value outweighs cost, but complicated "solutions" don't work well for me anymore, and I increasingly value simple elegance in my software.
