5 ms·

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming

46 points by redbell 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
YPPH 3y ago
Take one basic feature lacking from the web client - bulk printing all of the emails in a folder. That should be enough to show the web client is not fit for purpose. Not to mention all the organisations relying on extensions. Very tacky move from Microsoft.
Simulacra 3y ago
Never. I refuse to update to this stupid edge browser-based outlook.
erkt 3y ago
Hey look something that’s perfect, let’s fix it.
edandersen 3y ago
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.
- Amezarak 3y ago
  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?
  - 7952 3y ago
    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.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- cynicalsecurity 3y ago
  It's like trying to stop a natural disaster. Microsoft products are cursed.
- linmob 3y ago
  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.
  - chrisan 3y ago
    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. Maybe a fresh reinstall or something?
  - sebazzz 3y ago
    Office applications can do all weird kind of things. Often it is caused by 3rd party COM add-ons.
jwrallie 3y ago
I'm wondering how many human hours will be wasted in the transition. Every worker that uses a computer depends on email software daily and ends up creating a certain workflow within years of use. I am glad I am using Thunderbird. All my colleagues are using Outlook, I will see how they will transition, but I will be surprised if it is smooth.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > human hours will be wasted in the transition You're looking at it wrong. It's not "waste", it's engagement, the lifeblood of startups and any kind of consumer tech company since the last decade.
neilalexander 3y ago
In many ways this is a "classic Microsoft" move — take something that works perfectly fine and replace it with something new but completely inferior and often less featureful. They have been doing this in the consumer space for years and inevitably users get upset but move on. What I doubt they have considered is the number of businesses dragging-and-dropping mails as EML files and working with offline PST folders and relying on various other invisible features daily that will be completely broken by the transition, not to mention that many businesses likely won't be as tolerant of that breakage as the average consumer will.
- prepend 3y ago
  > dragging-and-dropping mails as EML files This is extremely prevalent in my org. With decades of emails saved on the file system and used as evidence of procedural workflow. It’s now getting annoying as different parts of the org are on different clients so these files don’t always open. There’s no easy equivalent on the web client or Mac client. Print as pdf sort of does the same thing with a durable record of the email, but takes many more clicks and seconds. Comically, the people I know who just print out emails and physically file them will be the only ones with real records in years time.
  - doubled112 3y ago
    > people I know who just print out emails One of my biggest "what?!" moments was when we received a fax from a user who printed an email then wrote the reply on it in pen. Guess she liked her hard copies.
    - basscomm 3y ago
      I once received an email that was a scan of a printout of a screenshot of a pdf.
- anon373839 3y ago
  > dragging-and-dropping mails as EML files and working with offline PST folders Extremely common in the legal field. Extremely.
ZiiS 3y ago
I do understand for people relying on it but lets also remember just how much effort it takes to support the very very weird HTML (basically MS Word) that Outlook requires.
- croes 3y ago
  Don't forget the reason for the weird HTML: They did not want to or could not secure Outlook with modern HTML, which is why they switched to the old HTML version of Word.
- RedShift1 3y ago
  To me it seems ridiculous to throw away an entire program which has so much more going on than this one "weird HTML renderer". Rewrite entire program for just this one thing?? Just replace the HTML renderer in Outlook then.
  - ZiiS 3y ago
    From MS's POV they have just replaced the HTML renderer in Outlook. They just took the opportunity to drop some hard to maintain legacy code (COM compatibility) and "improve" the UX in ways people predictably hate.
Baguette5242 3y ago
Last time I tried the new Outlook, I casually pressed “Alt+H, MV, A” to perform an “Always move to the folder…” action, guess what, the new Outlook at the time didn’t even supported the keyboard shortcuts. What is the point of rolling out a new version of your software if it doesn’t even support basic features from the previous version ? I would prefer MS to be blunt and honest and just say “From now on, it’s Office on the web and suck on it loosers !” Instead of releasing half baked apps that are neither comfortable to use on the web nor on desktop version. This said, let’s wait and see, MS was able to make a pretty decent Electron App (VS Code) and maybe they can do the same kind of magic with Office apps. I don’t know.
- LaundroMat 3y ago
  They forget their own history. Wasn't one of the key features of the first versions of Word that switching from WordPerfect was easy because Word used the same keyboard shortcuts?
- ksherlock 3y ago
  Skype and Teams are also electron. That's probably a better predictor.
  - Baguette5242 3y ago
    Yeah I know. And I don’t understand 2 things about it: 1) How is it possible to have a company releasing VSCode wich is a quite viable and ok to use Electron app and on the other hand, releasing some Electron garbage such as Skype or Teams. 2) Why MS discontinued the version of Teams on Linux ?! Isn’t the purpose of Electron App to encapsulate web apps to make them look more native *and* be able to release these *cross-platform* I mean if your Electron app is working for PC and Mac, then, why not releasing it on Linux ?
trentnix 3y ago
New Outlook was so messy to use with GMail (what my employer uses) that I’ve switched to Thunderbird. I can’t say Thunderbird is really all that great, but it’s better (and behaves more predictably) than new Outlook. Generally, desktop email clients (and email in general) feel due for disruption.
- w0m 3y ago
  Hosted integration seems to be the key now.
silverwind 3y ago
Does "New Outlook" support things like flexbox yet? According to https://www.caniemail.com/features/css-display-flex/ https://www.caniemail.com/features/css-display-flex/ it's a no, but I'm not sure which version that site tracks.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  It should match the outlook.com version.
bluedino 3y ago
I like the versions of outlook from 97/2000, how clean, compact, and uncluttered they are. The core functionality hasn't changed much but there are so many random toolbars and crap plastered all over the place anymore. It's hard to find a clean spot to click on to just drag a window now.
- dkekenflxlf 3y ago
  ++1!!
gcanyon 3y ago
Microsoft is in a huge catch-22 here: 1. Microsoft apps are incredibly featureful: they seemingly never say no to adding a feature. Their bloat and lack of simplicity is one of the main reasons I dislike MS products: I'll take a simple product I can actually over one that makes me think just to get the basics done almost every time. 2. Seemingly the only way MS can step off this treadmill is to completely abandon an existing product and start anew. But even there, users are raising cain about their favorite feature(s) that aren't included in the replacement. All of that said: people complaining about a five-year window seems insane to me. In five years we're going to be telling our AI assistant to communicate with the other side's AI assistant, come to a mutually beneficial agreement that doesn't compromise on points X and Y but allows leeway on point Z, and let us all know the result when done. And it will be done two minutes after the other side gives their AI assistant instructions.
mikedelfino 3y ago
I had never heard of that COM integration feature people would miss, but regarding email, calendar and contacts, I've been using Outlook web at work for two years, and it works perfectly fine for my simple use case. Some colleagues insist on using the desktop version or even Thunderbird, and I honestly can't see why they bother. Perhaps Microsoft considers simple use cases like mine to be the norm. That could explain the plan to discontinue support for the desktop client in 2029(!!).
kotaKat 3y ago
Bonus points that New Outlook(tm) can't launch offline. At all. Throws an obscure error that doesn't even say it's from Outlook and fails. Meanwhile, New Teams(tm)? It'll happily open up offline, let me browse all my chats, everything, while telling me that I'm offline. Learned this one the interesting way by watching my laptop take an extra long time grabbing a network connection during boot as everything was launching.
SlackingOff123 3y ago
I have a dozen or so of carefully crafted rules to sort my email in different folders in the current version of Outlook. When I last tried the "new Outlook", none of my rules worked anymore as they have been severely incapacitated in the new version. I'm looking forward to having my workflow forcibly disrupted.
zamadatix 3y ago
New Outlook has actually been decent for me. It started out pretty bad and slowly got better. The big decider will be if they continue that path or stop early in the next two years, not whether or not the app is exactly the old one. E.g. COM add-ins are out but cross platform (what will be browser/phone/web and Windows desktop) compatible extensions will be pushed instead. Some will miss the COM addins after the end of the decade but most will be really glad it's not just a legacy windows desktop that has the addin they need at that point.

46 points by redbell 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

YPPH 3y ago

Take one basic feature lacking from the web client - bulk printing all of the emails in a folder. That should be enough to show the web client is not fit for purpose. Not to mention all the organisations relying on extensions. Very tacky move from Microsoft.

Simulacra 3y ago

Never. I refuse to update to this stupid edge browser-based outlook.

erkt 3y ago

Hey look something that’s perfect, let’s fix it.

edandersen 3y ago

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.

Amezarak 3y ago
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?
- 7952 3y ago
  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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
It's like trying to stop a natural disaster. Microsoft products are cursed.
linmob 3y ago
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.
- chrisan 3y ago
  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. Maybe a fresh reinstall or something?
- sebazzz 3y ago
  Office applications can do all weird kind of things. Often it is caused by 3rd party COM add-ons.

jwrallie 3y ago

I'm wondering how many human hours will be wasted in the transition. Every worker that uses a computer depends on email software daily and ends up creating a certain workflow within years of use. I am glad I am using Thunderbird. All my colleagues are using Outlook, I will see how they will transition, but I will be surprised if it is smooth.

Nextgrid 3y ago
> human hours will be wasted in the transition You're looking at it wrong. It's not "waste", it's engagement, the lifeblood of startups and any kind of consumer tech company since the last decade.

neilalexander 3y ago

In many ways this is a "classic Microsoft" move — take something that works perfectly fine and replace it with something new but completely inferior and often less featureful. They have been doing this in the consumer space for years and inevitably users get upset but move on. What I doubt they have considered is the number of businesses dragging-and-dropping mails as EML files and working with offline PST folders and relying on various other invisible features daily that will be completely broken by the transition, not to mention that many businesses likely won't be as tolerant of that breakage as the average consumer will.

prepend 3y ago
> dragging-and-dropping mails as EML files This is extremely prevalent in my org. With decades of emails saved on the file system and used as evidence of procedural workflow. It’s now getting annoying as different parts of the org are on different clients so these files don’t always open. There’s no easy equivalent on the web client or Mac client. Print as pdf sort of does the same thing with a durable record of the email, but takes many more clicks and seconds. Comically, the people I know who just print out emails and physically file them will be the only ones with real records in years time.
- doubled112 3y ago
  > people I know who just print out emails One of my biggest "what?!" moments was when we received a fax from a user who printed an email then wrote the reply on it in pen. Guess she liked her hard copies.
  - basscomm 3y ago
    I once received an email that was a scan of a printout of a screenshot of a pdf.
anon373839 3y ago
> dragging-and-dropping mails as EML files and working with offline PST folders Extremely common in the legal field. Extremely.

ZiiS 3y ago

I do understand for people relying on it but lets also remember just how much effort it takes to support the very very weird HTML (basically MS Word) that Outlook requires.

croes 3y ago
Don't forget the reason for the weird HTML: They did not want to or could not secure Outlook with modern HTML, which is why they switched to the old HTML version of Word.
RedShift1 3y ago
To me it seems ridiculous to throw away an entire program which has so much more going on than this one "weird HTML renderer". Rewrite entire program for just this one thing?? Just replace the HTML renderer in Outlook then.
- ZiiS 3y ago
  From MS's POV they have just replaced the HTML renderer in Outlook. They just took the opportunity to drop some hard to maintain legacy code (COM compatibility) and "improve" the UX in ways people predictably hate.

Baguette5242 3y ago

Last time I tried the new Outlook, I casually pressed “Alt+H, MV, A” to perform an “Always move to the folder…” action, guess what, the new Outlook at the time didn’t even supported the keyboard shortcuts. What is the point of rolling out a new version of your software if it doesn’t even support basic features from the previous version ? I would prefer MS to be blunt and honest and just say “From now on, it’s Office on the web and suck on it loosers !” Instead of releasing half baked apps that are neither comfortable to use on the web nor on desktop version. This said, let’s wait and see, MS was able to make a pretty decent Electron App (VS Code) and maybe they can do the same kind of magic with Office apps. I don’t know.

LaundroMat 3y ago
They forget their own history. Wasn't one of the key features of the first versions of Word that switching from WordPerfect was easy because Word used the same keyboard shortcuts?
ksherlock 3y ago
Skype and Teams are also electron. That's probably a better predictor.
- Baguette5242 3y ago
  Yeah I know. And I don’t understand 2 things about it: 1) How is it possible to have a company releasing VSCode wich is a quite viable and ok to use Electron app and on the other hand, releasing some Electron garbage such as Skype or Teams. 2) Why MS discontinued the version of Teams on Linux ?! Isn’t the purpose of Electron App to encapsulate web apps to make them look more native *and* be able to release these *cross-platform* I mean if your Electron app is working for PC and Mac, then, why not releasing it on Linux ?

trentnix 3y ago

New Outlook was so messy to use with GMail (what my employer uses) that I’ve switched to Thunderbird. I can’t say Thunderbird is really all that great, but it’s better (and behaves more predictably) than new Outlook. Generally, desktop email clients (and email in general) feel due for disruption.

w0m 3y ago
Hosted integration seems to be the key now.

silverwind 3y ago

Does "New Outlook" support things like flexbox yet? According to https://www.caniemail.com/features/css-display-flex/ https://www.caniemail.com/features/css-display-flex/ it's a no, but I'm not sure which version that site tracks.

zamadatix 3y ago
It should match the outlook.com version.

bluedino 3y ago

I like the versions of outlook from 97/2000, how clean, compact, and uncluttered they are. The core functionality hasn't changed much but there are so many random toolbars and crap plastered all over the place anymore. It's hard to find a clean spot to click on to just drag a window now.

dkekenflxlf 3y ago
++1!!

gcanyon 3y ago

Microsoft is in a huge catch-22 here: 1. Microsoft apps are incredibly featureful: they seemingly never say no to adding a feature. Their bloat and lack of simplicity is one of the main reasons I dislike MS products: I'll take a simple product I can actually over one that makes me think just to get the basics done almost every time. 2. Seemingly the only way MS can step off this treadmill is to completely abandon an existing product and start anew. But even there, users are raising cain about their favorite feature(s) that aren't included in the replacement. All of that said: people complaining about a five-year window seems insane to me. In five years we're going to be telling our AI assistant to communicate with the other side's AI assistant, come to a mutually beneficial agreement that doesn't compromise on points X and Y but allows leeway on point Z, and let us all know the result when done. And it will be done two minutes after the other side gives their AI assistant instructions.

mikedelfino 3y ago

I had never heard of that COM integration feature people would miss, but regarding email, calendar and contacts, I've been using Outlook web at work for two years, and it works perfectly fine for my simple use case. Some colleagues insist on using the desktop version or even Thunderbird, and I honestly can't see why they bother. Perhaps Microsoft considers simple use cases like mine to be the norm. That could explain the plan to discontinue support for the desktop client in 2029(!!).

kotaKat 3y ago

Bonus points that New Outlook(tm) can't launch offline. At all. Throws an obscure error that doesn't even say it's from Outlook and fails. Meanwhile, New Teams(tm)? It'll happily open up offline, let me browse all my chats, everything, while telling me that I'm offline. Learned this one the interesting way by watching my laptop take an extra long time grabbing a network connection during boot as everything was launching.

SlackingOff123 3y ago

I have a dozen or so of carefully crafted rules to sort my email in different folders in the current version of Outlook. When I last tried the "new Outlook", none of my rules worked anymore as they have been severely incapacitated in the new version. I'm looking forward to having my workflow forcibly disrupted.

zamadatix 3y ago

New Outlook has actually been decent for me. It started out pretty bad and slowly got better. The big decider will be if they continue that path or stop early in the next two years, not whether or not the app is exactly the old one. E.g. COM add-ins are out but cross platform (what will be browser/phone/web and Windows desktop) compatible extensions will be pushed instead. Some will miss the COM addins after the end of the decade but most will be really glad it's not just a legacy windows desktop that has the addin they need at that point.