Who would like to see a Mail, iCal, Address book suite?

I guess Apple has its reason for not putting all these apps together, but I don't understand why. Maybe to not look like Outlook??

I really like Apple's apps, but after using Outlook, and now Entourage, and having everything "under one roof" I just don't want to have to deal with them all apart. When I get a message saying, "let's get together Friday, I don't want to have to launch another app just to check my schedule. Plus the other Entourage features like tasks, projects and assigning emails to events, tasks and projects are nice too for organization. I don't know if iCal and Mail have a way of sending an appointment email with invites like Entourage, but that's a must have.

I would just love to see the all-in-one of Entourage combined with the nice Apple apps.

So, what do you use and why? Do you like having them apart or know why they're apart? Are there any other 3rd party apps that do the job better?

I suspect they are apart because Apple isn't targeting the business market. Since Address book and Apple Mail more or less work together already, I don't see it as a big deal. I don't use iCal for that much as I don't schedule my social life on my calendar on my computer. I keep track of my business travel schedule on my iCal, but only because I can sync it with .Mac and my wife can see it without me having to e-mail her.

The "under one roof" idea is nice , but I don't think many folks who use Outlook either at home or work use it to anywhere near it's full capabilities. When you add too much stuff that people never actually use, the App becomes useless to 90% of the users. All those "features" become too complicated to figure out and the average use, especially at home, never bother to figure them out or even know they exist.

Now if they made it simple like iPhoto and iWeb integration, the 1 button click to make things work, that might be nice, but I still suspect that 90% of the users would never use it.

iCal and Mail will be better integrated in Leopard, so that it'll be easier to send and receive appointments. iCal does seriously need some attention.

Most of the time, I could do without the bloat of Entourage. But if that's your thing...well, use Entourage!

I use most of the features of Entourage, but I can see that most people wouldn't have a use for all that, so the current set of apps would be find for the average consumer.