What does this mean for you as a contractor or employee of such a corporation? Basically: besides looking like Neanderthals to people outside the corporation you are sharing files with, you are locked out of some of the best plugins available for the Office suite.
One such plugin I desparately wanted to install was Xobni (Inbox spelled backward) which allows you to actually search and organize your Outlook Inbox! The default search that comes with Outlook 2002 is abhorrent, slow and literally takes over Outlook until it feels it's done.
But guess what? Xobni and 99% of the other newer Office plugins out there won't support any version of Office prior to 2003.
Enter Google Desktop, probably one of the best kept secrets for solving Outlook 2002's poor search functionality. Simply install Google Desktop, setup up your preferences for which types of files you want indexed (Outlook being one of the types) and leave Outlook open for a while and Google will do it's magic.
I'm sure your Corporation, if they are still using Office 2002, wouldn't approve of installing "3rd party software" but really this one is worth the risk of getting caught.