Outlook Functionality

I just added some contacts to my Outlook Address book and I began thinking to myself, why in the world doesn’t Outlook let you link contacts to each other through some defined relationships? The main reason I think that is because the custom application we use at work to maintain tasks, contacts and case information does this to infinity and it’s very handy.

Here’s how it should work in Outlook

On the details page, if I can put in information such as an Anniversary date, why can’t I link that contact to their spouse in Outlook? If contacts are linked, I should then also be able to share an address for those two people across contacts. This is a very normalized way of looking at things, but why should I have to enter the same address for someone that I’ve already entered once?

This would be more common with business contacts and a business address right? And that brings me to my second question.

Why can’t I add one contact and then say add another contact for the same company without repeating basic company information like name, address, phone #’s, website, etc.?

This just seems too simple to do for Microsoft to not have done it already, what’s the deal? Why isn’t Outlook seemingly based much more on Access database principles than it already is?