If Apple can have feature parity between a Mac-ass Mac app and a Web app, why can't Microsoft? Why does Microsoft need to reduce its feature set to the lowest common denominator?
I'm of course talking of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
On the one side: Microsoft seems to be trying to work towards feature parity with New Outlook but its an application being built in the open with the most agile of agile and there's no clear time horizon of when that parity will happen. Every month or so there's new features and more feature parity (it likes to tell you that, too).
On the other side: Old Outlook grew to be an organic mess of COM components, duct tape, and glitter. Some of those COM components that people think of as "native functionality" was second-party and third-party components written by a weird grab bag of companies, including some that no longer exist. Expecting full feature parity from Outlook sounds to me like an impossible task, especially because how can Microsoft know all those third-party components? It almost seems like a case where a new brand might have been better, but it's also hard to blame Microsoft with realizing that they have a lot to lose if they kill the Outlook brand.
(I'm willing to bet S/MIME was based on fragile old IE code. I'm somewhat happy in New Outlook now, but I find I keep having to switch to Old Outlook for silly "required" corporate Add-Ins that use old APIs and haven't upgraded yet/give the impression that they might not upgrade ever.)
I'm of course talking of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.