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its sort of the business model at this point. you cant just subscribe to security updates without new features. to justify the cost they always have to cram new, and by new i mean change.

google feels the same way. things that work need to be rebuilt and rereleased to justify headcount.

the mail -> new outlook is just another in the long tradition of microsoft pushing a new native gui framework, only to abandon it in house. How can they ever expect developers developers developers to commit to another future abandonware.

https://irrlicht3d.org/index.php?t=1626

they really should be going in reverse and making all their apps pure native and then getting them to also render as html.

With Google, they intentionally bloat their OS/app updates so that users are eventually forced to upgrade for decent performance again.

New Outlook still doesn't handle S/MIME. That means it's between annoying to useless in large companies, depending on the volume of such e-mails you're getting.

What email client is popular in large enterprises then? Last time I worked in a company like that it was all microsoft software, including outlook, by policy

Old Outlook

Real outlook... not Outlook Online wrapped in a WebView2 wrapper

Old Outlook, as 'w3ll_w3ll_w3ll said.

Here's the thing though: Microsoft is rather heavy-handed about pushing "New Outlook" and "New Teams". New Outlook is mostly just a wrapped webapp - so slightly cleaner than the old one, but otherwise much slower and less functional. Now, guess which Outlook has had support for Copilot for the past couple months? :).

Right now it's mostly an annoyance - I have to switch back and forth couple times a day, depending on whether I need "snooze e-mail" or S/MIME at any given moment. But the latter is really a dealbreaker. Strange for a product sold to corporations, which makes me think that MS is planning to get people off e-mails entirely.

Yeah new teams is much less of an annoyance in terms of change as it was already a slow web app and users don't really expect much from it. And the UI didn't change at all.

They bogged it down with too many features and now they're trying to scrape it up by having a slightly more optimised framework, which is basically still exactly the same, it's now just based on edge instead of chrome which we all know are really the same thing under the hood anyway.

So where new teams is just a cutesy little badge on the same thing, new outlook is really a serious deprecation.

And yeah they're trying to get people off email for sure. Microsoft even have banners of "don't mail but teams" under their consultants' emails.

Makes sense from a strategic perspective to move from an open platform to something they fully control and own. It's the old lock-in game they've always played, after their initial strategy of Embracing Extend failed on email (they made a huge attempt but Google was very successful so the same and now there's a kinda duopoly stalemate they can never win)

If Apple can have feature parity between a Mac-ass Mac app and a Web app, why can't Microsoft? Why does Microsoft need to reduce its feature set to the lowest common denominator?

I'm of course talking of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

On the one side: Microsoft seems to be trying to work towards feature parity with New Outlook but its an application being built in the open with the most agile of agile and there's no clear time horizon of when that parity will happen. Every month or so there's new features and more feature parity (it likes to tell you that, too).

On the other side: Old Outlook grew to be an organic mess of COM components, duct tape, and glitter. Some of those COM components that people think of as "native functionality" was second-party and third-party components written by a weird grab bag of companies, including some that no longer exist. Expecting full feature parity from Outlook sounds to me like an impossible task, especially because how can Microsoft know all those third-party components? It almost seems like a case where a new brand might have been better, but it's also hard to blame Microsoft with realizing that they have a lot to lose if they kill the Outlook brand.

(I'm willing to bet S/MIME was based on fragile old IE code. I'm somewhat happy in New Outlook now, but I find I keep having to switch to Old Outlook for silly "required" corporate Add-Ins that use old APIs and haven't upgraded yet/give the impression that they might not upgrade ever.)

> Yeah new teams is much less of an annoyance in terms of change as it was already a slow web app and users don't really expect much from it. And the UI didn't change at all.

They still broke some things. Instead of custom contact lists in Chat, you're supposed supposed to use the People app, and until just right now, that one didn't (!) show the presence status of each contact. It seems that very very recently they've finally fixed that, although it's still less compact and at-a-glance than the old contact list.

And "Notify when available" is annoyingly missing in New Teams, too.

Microsoft love to force things onto end users these days. The latest thing is the "focussed inbox". Suddenly our school had it enabled and a whole bunch of people didn't see their emails as it hived them off to the Other tab.

Yeah and their evangelisation makes it really hard to opt out. They're always making it a show to portray users not using it as slowpokes who don't keep up.

Even though I don't want Microsoft to decide what's important and not in my inbox. I get so little I can easily do that myself because I block any and all unsolicited sales attempt forever - which Microsoft is trying to make harder because those people are their customer too! For while the 'new outlook' didn't even have the block sender option. Only the less severe report spam. But I want to block them (and ideally their entire company) forever.

This strategy works great for me and I often gloat over my trash folder with the many sales emails there "I know you're busy, you probably forgot to respond to my 20 previous emails but I proposed you another meeting, does tomorrow 2:00 suit? Here's the invite!". I love seeing them waste their time. Most of them seem actually manual even (despite most not even seeming to have bothered reading what I actually do)

I really hate Microsoft's approach to change management. They're only advocating what's best for them, not for the users. There's no win-win here, it's all them and they don't even attempt to hide it except under a really thin sleazy sales veneer.

Setup a block rule, they are still there. Send it straight to that rule. The rule should nuke the email before it hits the mailbox.

> I noticed recently that Microsoft relented and soon starts introducing CoPilot features into old outlook (or 'real' or 'full' outlook as people are calling it at work).

I thought they were done developing the old outlook since they started hacking it instead of doing things properly. For example, in the rounded corner update for the old outlook, they started drawing black squares over message pane during resizing, probably to hide visual defects.

Glad to know there is a chance that they might keep the old outlook around.

I'd assume that would probably be more that "CoPilot all-the-things" took priority over "leave Outlook in maintenance-only mode".

Even the "round all the corners" changes seemed mostly "free" from component library upgrades from changes in other Office and Windows apps and components shared with "New Outlook" (on the one side: people keep assuming New Outlook is a bloated web app, especially because it has a lot of UI consistency with Outlook.com now, but there's a lot of evidence it is more complicated that just a web app; on the other side: a lot of those painting problems especially during resizing relate to Old Outlook has been partly "a web app" for a long time; hybrids apps are hybrid).

Slow is the least of its problems. There are missing features all over the place. For instance, you can no longer drag emails to the desktop or into another app.