Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

xda-developers.com

31–40 of 136 posts

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#31
post #2

The lack of tech documentation and the fact they obfuscate or even don't provide "don't do that" options goes very strongly into older Microsoft dark patterns "for your convenience" They did this with backup. Want to backup to local media? Why would you do that when we will back it up in one drive which you must pay for.

Unfortunely many business units from the organization seem to never have changed that much from the old ways.

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#32
post #21
post #18

They've recently renamed Outlook to Outlook (classic). So you can see which way the wind is blowing on this. Outlook (new) is still missing tons of big features and the UI sucks.

Outlook new is missing one fundamental feature which is automation. This blob of html can not be programmed unlike predecessors for more 15 years. It is so easy to instantiate and use old outlook that I really fail to understand what is their endgame with this killing of a top and well respected product.

I think the article has it correct, its their way of forcing all users to have their emails stored and scraped by Microsoft, no matter the provider.

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#35
The worst thing about this, to me, is that Windows Mail client, the one they're discontinuing, is a fantastic piece of software. It's simple, lean, capable, and elegantly designed. It's perfect for a novice computer user to check their email on.

The new cloud thing is worse in every way. It confusingly copies your email over from your email provider's servers onto Microsoft's servers, and then shows an ad that looks exactly like an email in the middle of all the emails. In other words, it injects spam, but the spam is special because you can't delete it. Also, it needs to run in a browser for no apparent reason. For anybody currently using Windows Mail, it's a pure downgrade.

I understand that a company running a cloud service needs to finance this service, eg with ads, but this doesn't need to be a cloud service at all. It's so extremely backward that I simply can't comprehend how it made it through all the management layers at Microsoft. If all builtin software that comes with Windows turns into a bad, ad-ridden cloud apps then that's just one more reason for people to switch to Chromebooks, right? What's next, ads in Solitaire?¹

I miss the time when Microsoft wanted to make useful software.

¹) At the risk of ruining the joke by explaining it: Microsoft already did this. They removed Solitaire from Windows and replaced it with a terrible Windows Store app which indeed is loaded to the rim with screamy animated banner ads. I assume that the PM responsible for that got promoted to the email team or something.

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#36
post #18

They've recently renamed Outlook to Outlook (classic). So you can see which way the wind is blowing on this. Outlook (new) is still missing tons of big features and the UI sucks.

Similar to how WinDev keeps pushing WinUI as the successor, while it is still quite lacking versus UWP, which was already quite lacking versus WPF.

It is no accident that WPF has been reborn at BUILD 2024, as the 2nd official way to do Windows apps.

And in the end it hardly matters, as the business apps unit is now full of people that only understand Web, probably started using Windows when they joined Microsoft, and keep shipping stuff stuck into Web widgets.

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#37
post #18

They've recently renamed Outlook to Outlook (classic). So you can see which way the wind is blowing on this. Outlook (new) is still missing tons of big features and the UI sucks.

I will keep using "classic" for as long as possible. This trend to turn everything into painfully slow web apps is really getting on my nerves. As an example, I use quick steps very frequently to categorize emails. In classic Outlook, I click the button and the email is moved immediately - in the new Outlook it has a ~1 second delay until the email is moved and I can move the next one. Takes so long to get through my inbox.

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#39
post #18

They've recently renamed Outlook to Outlook (classic). So you can see which way the wind is blowing on this. Outlook (new) is still missing tons of big features and the UI sucks.

Not only does the UI suck, most keyboard shortcuts also no longer work or are just way to slow for my workflow.

Re: Microsoft's new Outlook client moves your email to the cloud (2023)

#40

are we just waiting for excel to exhibit this behavior shortly?

We're already going there, the new Python integration for Excel is cloud-only - the Python is not executed locally. It wouldn't surprise me if more and more features in Excel going forward will be the same way.
Post reply on HN