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Comment by someoneelse987 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your critique. This is just a hunch but I don't think they are ahead:

- Outlook.com must be one of the worst web apps there is. Compared to Gmail it's just plain awful.

- Sharepoint is decidedly one of the worst pieces of software ever built, that is if you are a developer. If you are an editor/content manager then it is possible it's just fine.

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I use Outlook.com as my main email provider. And I'm managing to convince people to move off've Gmail onto it because of it's streamlined interface. What do you find wrong in it?

It might just be a matter of preference but to me Outlook.com is an attempt to webify Outlook The Desktop Client, which was horrible to start with. But they made it worse than the desktop app.

An example: while searching in your Outlook.com "client" it enters a new state, the search state. When you are done searching there is a left arrow in the navigation panel which you can click to go back to the "normal" state of things. Awkward.

I'm a longtime Windows user, familiar with Microsoft user interfaces, but to me there is nothing to love about Outlook.com.

It's deliberately slow in Linux (applies to all Office products)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932226

Issue still happens to me: easy to test switching agents.

That’s interesting, especially as that’s not what the link you’ve kindly referenced says. Congratulations on being able to change the user agent - Microsoft is not you and has to support decisions it makes. I can see why there’d be little cause for them to perform Linux testing given the small market share. So, if you were Microsoft - and not you - would you rather potentially break the experience for Linux users, or not enable what appears to be OS/browser specific code that speeds up the experience? Again, calling this a deliberate slowdown is extremely misleading.

The Outlook.com app that just rolled out of Beta (and seems much more closely related to the work the ex-Accompli team has been doing with Windows Mail app that is also the iOS/Android Outlook apps) is rather good. It's probably still a few months until it rolls out to most Office 365 tenants, though.

You can't beat Gmail labels and filters.

Outlook likes to duplicate things. They don't even have smart folder support in their web UI.

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