No, I get not having a choice. But he specifically used the word “hope” to describe his desire to have Office available for Linux.

[...] Outlook [...] it is the best email client by far [...]

You must be kidding. I get it that you might be required to use it for work (I've been in that boat more than once). But outlook is a terrible, buggy, and infuriating clusterfuck of an email client. There are so many better alternatives. It has piss-poor handling for different encodings, still not defaulting to utf8. Randomly showing garbled Chinese letters to some people sometimes for no obvious reason. Losing connection to Exchange for hours without telling you. Still not supporting quoting standards which have been around for three decades. The settings are a convoluted mess. Filtering can only be done via a super clunky and unintuitive GUI; no scripting support. I could go on and on and on ... The only thing where it is arguably better than other alternatives, is with the calender integration and for planning meetings. But that is only because that is not a common email client feature, hence why most email clients don't have it at all. But even for that there are alternatives which are on par if not better. Kontact from the KDE suite comes to mind. I mean, which demented mind at Microsoft thought it was a good idea, that an email equals a calendar entry for a meeting? The obvious way to implement it is that you have two things that are linked, that reference each other: one email, one calendar entry (like everybody else implements it). Microsoft: emails and calendar entries are the same thing - delete one, lose the other. I can not wrap my head around how anybody can have used outlook and comparable alternatives and come to the conclusion that the infuriatung dumpster fire of outlook is "the best thing". Either you haven't really worked with a meaningful number of alternatives, are trolling, or have some severe mental issues (Stockholm syndrome?) that you should seek help for.