Unfortunately that always happens when someone has the dominant market position. If you look at last generation's email leader (Lotus Notes) they were lazy and terrible until someone else came along who did it better (namely Microsoft).
Now Lotus Notes is dead. Exchange/Outlook at the current front runners, and they are producing really lazy email clients and not really pushing email forward at all.
What can be done? No clue. The only organisation seemingly able to compete with Microsoft in this arena is Google with their Google Apps for business/education offering. But that has its own issues.
At least Microsoft has made "Outlook Online" a lot better in recent years thanks to their push for Office 365 Subscriptions.
PS - Search in Outlook is shockingly terrible. For some reason during the Vista era someone at Microsoft said: "Let's make search terrible in all of our products." So Vista's search was junk (read: replace a nice Windows 95 search sidebar with hidden obscure magic keywords which didn't work, and only index "known" file types (which is none)) and that filtered down to Outlook which got a huge bloated indexer which is inconsistent, slow, and still relies on magic keywords to accomplish anything.
PPS - Thunderbird also has a terrible search indexer, however it also offers simple filtering which is wonderful. You can disable what they call their "global indexer" (which you should, it sucks) and then just use the "quick search" box within each folder, it is insanely quick, and the filtering options offered a huge efficiency gain.
Now Lotus Notes is dead. Exchange/Outlook at the current front runners, and they are producing really lazy email clients and not really pushing email forward at all.
What can be done? No clue. The only organisation seemingly able to compete with Microsoft in this arena is Google with their Google Apps for business/education offering. But that has its own issues.
At least Microsoft has made "Outlook Online" a lot better in recent years thanks to their push for Office 365 Subscriptions.
PS - Search in Outlook is shockingly terrible. For some reason during the Vista era someone at Microsoft said: "Let's make search terrible in all of our products." So Vista's search was junk (read: replace a nice Windows 95 search sidebar with hidden obscure magic keywords which didn't work, and only index "known" file types (which is none)) and that filtered down to Outlook which got a huge bloated indexer which is inconsistent, slow, and still relies on magic keywords to accomplish anything. PPS - Thunderbird also has a terrible search indexer, however it also offers simple filtering which is wonderful. You can disable what they call their "global indexer" (which you should, it sucks) and then just use the "quick search" box within each folder, it is insanely quick, and the filtering options offered a huge efficiency gain.