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

Let's be fair first, it works most of time (I know it's a low bar). And I actually prefer its aesthetics than the Outlook (classic) and Mail app.

Now, back to its bugs/issues:

1. Open an email in a search folder will not mark it as read. This is the biggest gripe I have. Since Outlook (new) does not provide any native way to add a label of "unread" on the sidebar, I created a search folder with "select a type = Unread mail" and added it to my favorite. However, it's almost unusable due to the bug mentioned above.

2. You CANNOT search non-ASCII (i.e. Chinese, Japanese, etc.) category (tag). You can add them, (and if you use a, say, Chinese client, the default color categories are literally in Chinese!) but searching these categories (or just click from a tagged email) returns nothing. This fucked me so badly when I categorized 1000+ emails before realizing.

3. The state of the client at various places are often not in sync. For example you may have cleared your unread email already but the icon on taskbar still shows unread dot. Or you opened multiple windows and some say you have 0, some say you have 5. Or within the same window, the inbox sidebar label says 0 but a search folder label for certain condition (say, from certain email address) says otherwise when it's impossible. And there is no refresh button -- so if that happens you have to re-open manually or click a random label and then go back and wish it fixes itself.

I'm sure there are lots of others, but these are more than bad enough.

I'm genuinely concerned how they can ship a software at this stage, particularly issue 1 and 2 are very easily reproducible and I've reported them multiple times through feedback with only canned reply, and they're still not fixed after months.

They are definitely heading that way, I've been saying I expect them to for some time, and they are slowly proving my guess right.

It used to be that their cash cows were Windows (Desktop & Server), Office, SQL Server, and to a lesser extent Exchange (even earlier in time it was just DOS, Windows (desktop), and Office). Everything else, including Visual Studio despite charging a pile for it, was to funnel and capture people into using those, or to inconvenience startups in other areas that might later try to compete in one of those arenas.

Now their cash cows are Azure, Office subscriptions, and to a lesser extent SQL Server, Exchange, and advertising. They don't care what OS you use and what apps & services you run, but they want you to run it on Azure (unless you are a huge concern in which case the money from on-prem SQL and other licences are still worth talking about) and pay them subscriptions for storage & processing.

They can't just abandon Windows, that would look bad, but they don't want their own stuff to be keeping it alive any longer than needs be. If everyone shuffled over to Linux, Android, MacOS/iOS, etc. but still used online office and apps running in Azure, that would be ideal for them – the hassle of maintaining desktop Windows with all the hardware compatibility issues and such isn't something they would get into today if they were not already there.

Giving up on controlling their own browser engine was a big sign they were moving this way: let someone else deal with all that client UI gubbings, there is no practical MS-scale money in it, and concentrate on selling the subscription services to office users and devs. I think the failure of their attempt at mobile market-share was when this ball really got rolling internally: the thought at high levels in the business being “hang on, if we can walk away from that because it isn't worth the effort to keep pushing, could that be true of other end-user OS stuff too?”

It'll take time to move everything either properly cross-platform or at least browser-based, SQL Server was a big step in that direction, but that is relatively easy as it is effectively a micro-OS sitting atop something else, the likes of Visual Studio will be harder, but it will happen, and then Desktop Windows will be allowed to slowly die. Server Windows already is in cloud: devs are being pulled away from caring about the base OS to running everything in OS-agnostic functions and light container-based services instead.

This is why they don't care that people like me won't ever be buying into Windows 11 at all, even where we did hold our noses and let Windows 10 happen.