Why isn't there a better alternative to MS Outlook?

I don't think enough people are willing to pay for email servers or clients. The corporate customers that would are probably also buying other services. So it's probably not worth it for them unless there is decent bundling/integration.

Because the hill of "whats wrong with email/calendar/notes/todo/video" is a steep hill to climb.

IF you focus on email, lots of clients are better. If you seek integration into calendar services, you can't beat Google Mail.

I am running the current spec outlook on OSX, and its a dog, slow, lumpy, badly designed. Mail.app has problems but its better by far, but harder to configure in some ways.

Maybe outlook is the embrace-extend-control example we need to cite, when people ask why we worry about the modern Microsoft?

I suppose it’s due to two primary reasons:

1. It integrates best with their company groupware server, which is probably some variant of Exchange.

2. A lot of people (inexplicably to me) seem to really like using Outlook. They understand it well, the UX is relatively static, and it is powerful.

I haven't explored all of what Outlook can do but I assume it's like Jira and can do all sorts of things and integrates with all sorts of things.

If you're just comparing basic email and calendar, I'm not sure. For enterprise, if you don't already have a competing product, taking on Outlook is a big gamble. For casual users, built-in email clients are probably good enough for most users.

I used Thunderbird back in the day and it was slow but excellent in most other regards. And extensions fixed those "most other regards." I don't know what the state of Thunderbird is now, though, especially since it no longer supports older extensions.

Email client startups are always doomed to get acquihired.

Oh wow, a blast from the past, I haven't heard about anyone using Outlook since like 2003...

Try

https://www.emclient.com/