The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming
theregister.com
theregister.com
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.
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.
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.
Extremely common in the legal field. Extremely.
And despite it being a wrapper for Outlook Web, last time I used the New Outlook, I had to log in to the web version to inspect email headers.
The planned pst support has been taking months to arrive. Until then new outlook is effectively useless for my use cases.
At work we have to deal with parsing the".msg" abominations Outlook _actually_ exports.
They’re taking Outlook, which is a Windows-only locally installed piece of software, which can only be extended using Windows-specific APIs.
They’re replacing it with a cross platform codebase which runs on Windows, Mac, Mobile and online in a web-browser (so you can use it on Linux too).
This new version can be extended using web-technology, implemented however you like using whatever language you like, which will not just work on Windows, but on all platform targets (Windows, Mac, mobile, web) seamlessly in a single code base.
Yes. Some features and extension points are going away.
But let’s not pretend we’re getting nothing in return. This is a massive improvement for developers.
Disclaimer: responsible for Outlook addons in company I work for. When applicable, I greatly prefer the new model.
For me it means I’m able to have the same flows and capabilities available regardless of platform or “terminal” I’m using and not have to depend on a particular machine, OS or Outlook “installation”.
There are use-cases which are less supported, like dealing with EML-files, which I too consider a notable loss. Hopefully they manage to bring that back.
If you mean developer end users: those are either by company policy tied to use Windows because corporate antimalware like SEP, Zscaler or WDATP can be deployed and managed remote - or they could just use the web mail and pin that to their desktop as a native app. The “new Outlook” is just a web app, really.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
Maybe a fresh reinstall or something?
It's hard to find a clean spot to click on to just drag a window now.
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.
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.
Very tacky move from Microsoft.
Generally, desktop email clients (and email in general) feel due for disruption.
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.
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.
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.
According to https://www.caniemail.com/features/css-display-flex/ it's a no, but I'm not sure which version that site tracks.
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.