Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

I suspect a bunch of technical debt - the core of the application dates to 2000 or before (there are menu's changed for a very very long time).

View on HN

Does the design need to change to address technical debt?

First version of Outlook was Outlook 97.

It was supposed to be Outlook 95 and ship with Office 95, but the app was late.

I feel like at some point Microsoft deliberately decided not to want to maintain "old stuff" anymore. You see this with many other products as well. Desktop is bad, web is good.

Microsoft is moving away from the single-platform; they want their apps to run on Windows, web, Mac OS, iOS, Android, and maybe even Linux. They do not want to maintain radically different versions for all these different platforms.

Yes, at the cost of the desktop experience - it seems. And at the cost of customization.

The desktop experience has been secondary for years now -- Microsoft is only now catching up to that trend.

They shouldn't. Microsofts most valuable users are on desktop.

I'm not so sure. Desktop, particularly Windows, is definitely important, but mobile is used a ton even in business.

Microsofts tools obviously needs to work well on mobile, and I can understand not wanting to maintain multiple code bases, but I think their hurting their users by not doing it.

I know at least one CEO who will absolutely explode if they fuck up his Outlook. He probably have 20 years of business correspondences in there. Is that a good idea? Probably not, but he does. If Microsoft mess up Outlook, then there's very little reason for his company to not look at Google and Gmail, and he probably will just because he'll feel like Microsoft screwed him over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com