Replacing Outlook with whatever it is the "New Outlook" is supposed to be is so bad that Microsoft shareholders should get involved. It is a total destruction of value.
It's just bizarre. Probably 80% of corporations are paying Microsoft billions of dollars really just so they can have Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Excel. What makes it valuable is precisely that it is a "legacy" app people have used and built on for decades.
What does MS possibly stand to gain by replacing it? It's a mature application you can pretty much just leave in maintenance mode, with just a couple new features per release (I guess the new hotness would be adding AI or something.) How does it make sense to spend developer-time building an inferior (from a customer perspective) copy and then eliminate one of the reasons your customers choose you?
Those corporations often pay that money through IT departments that are somewhat distant from how the software is used. They are focused on security, manageability, maintenance, legal requirements, help desk workload etc. If it makes those things easier then it is a superior product for those people.
Also, this kind of move gets Microsoft closer to a world in which a workers laptops is like a Chromebook. Everything running in a walled garden of cloud, electron app, and browser tabs. And Microsoft providing the tooling as part of Azure. In the name of security they get to charge rent on everything. Need a fast GPU or more disk space? Rent it from Azure. Need a developer/ai environment? Rent it from Azure. It is a way of creating artificial scarcity and then charging people to escape that.
It depends. Old Outlook keeps failing me, in ways the new, dumb web app has not (yet):
- Not sending e-mail unless I am restarting it (I added Outbox to Favorites to catch this before hours have gone by)
- Crashing when I try to add an attachment, and loosing my drafted email
- Claiming it's out of memory and hence can't add my signature.
Now, granted, all this maybe due to incompentence at my workplace, or me having "too much email or calendars", but boy does Outlook get in the way of me getting work done. I've run into all of this over the last week, BTW.
I'm not saying you aren't experiencing that, but I've never heard of those complaints before and if they were remotely common there is no way Outlook would be used so much that we are at a point of people complaining it will go away.
