Having just spent the last decade working for large multinationals (IBM, EDS, Fujitsu, etc) I have to say that in effect most employee evaluations come down to "work harder not smarter". It is much easier to measure and rate how many hours an employee has worked, than to evaluate in detail the quality of their work.

This is pretty much how it goes down in my part of IBM:
- Once a year, the senior guys for your area get together to finalise the ratings for all of the plebs
- They have a basic set of criteria that are key, such as "productive utilisation" (= did said pleb work themselves nearly to death for the greater glory of the company), "give back" (= how much unpaid extra work did the pleb do for the company), and compliance with corporate regulations (no trivial event in the monsterous bureaucracy of IBM)
- Occasionally, a manager will try to get some recognition for one of their direct reports who has delivered quality work. Typically they are unable to quantify this in 30 seconds or less to the satisfaction of the rest of the managers present.
- As you can imagine, with 200 people to evaluate not much time gets spent on each pleb

Which is a long way of responding to your question "can't companies do employee evaluations at all?" with the answer "no, not really".

I'm an IBM-er, based in the antipodes. Sometime in the last year, it became compulsory to have Lotus Symphony pushed to our PCs (in the APAC region, at least) - I can't recall the exact date. But as yet we have not been told to stop using MS Office, and the new PC my PM was issued with last week came with it installed by default so it seems to still be part of the corporate SOE. I know that the guys in IBM Software Group (SWG) have been pushed pretty hard to use Symphony. I assume at some point the rest of us will be too. I have to say, I am not very excited about an IBM office suite. I would rather that IBM just supported Open Office.