For more than four years now I've been asking “why doesn't Outlook have a newsreader?” Microsoft almost never answers this question on the record. But, when you get their product managers off in a personal conversation over beers, they admit “it's cause our corporate clients don't want their employees to be off in newsgroups while they are at work.” Tons of things about Microsoft's software have been put there (or kept out) by big corporate clients of Microsoft's. To understand Microsoft's behavior, you must look at the pressures being put on Microsoft's board of directors. It no longer is about building a cool computer for end users or geeks like it was back in the 1980s. [Scobleizer Radio Weblog]