Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365 • Hacker News Board

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#41

Post by 486sx33 » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 1:40 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #20

sshine wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive As a programmer, if I could eliminate email at work altogether, it’d have a net benefit to my productivity.

I would kill for something that merged Teams and email into a single flow of messages and responses in multiple subjects and threads. I still miss my BlackBerry 10 messaging merging email, SMS, BBM…

This sounds awful I hate teams and try to never use it

I did like BBM BB on Android “hub” was horrid

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#42

Post by 486sx33 » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 1:42 AM UTC

perching_aix wrote: post #11

ThinkBeat wrote: post #5

Outlook is an odd duck. It is an application with so many flaws or weirdness and I dont like it. Though, being honest, I do hate it a bit less than all the other alternatives in that space. If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive. compared to GSuite/Workspace. If you are outside a Microsoft sphere it is harder to justify it. I use Gmail a lot. THe web interface is…

> If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive What does that mean in more detail? I only have typical corpo Outlook experience, and I find it passable at the best of times. Not even necessarily as the fault of Outlook.

It means you can get through 300 emails in 1/10 the time as you can in Gmail. Outlook’s layout and software is FAST.

Once it goes web or “new” it’s a laggy piece of crap, still maybe not as bad as g suite though

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#43

Post by 486sx33 » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 1:44 AM UTC

dlivingston wrote: post #9

ThinkBeat wrote: post #5

Outlook is an odd duck. It is an application with so many flaws or weirdness and I dont like it. Though, being honest, I do hate it a bit less than all the other alternatives in that space. If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive. compared to GSuite/Workspace. If you are outside a Microsoft sphere it is harder to justify it. I use Gmail a lot. THe web interface is…

Does MailMate work well with Office 365 accounts? And how does it compare to the stock Mail app? The screenshots I could find look pretty similar. I use Outlook for Mac at home and for Window at work. It's ironic that the Mac version is so much nicer than the Windows version. The Windows version feels like a wrapper around outlook.live.com.

It is unless you use old/legacy outlook. The “new” outlook is electron/webapp

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#44

Post by xnyan » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 1:45 AM UTC

perching_aix wrote: post #11

ThinkBeat wrote: post #5

Outlook is an odd duck. It is an application with so many flaws or weirdness and I dont like it. Though, being honest, I do hate it a bit less than all the other alternatives in that space. If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive. compared to GSuite/Workspace. If you are outside a Microsoft sphere it is harder to justify it. I use Gmail a lot. THe web interface is…

> If I am in a "Microsoft powered enterprise" Outlook empowers me to be ridiculously productive What does that mean in more detail? I only have typical corpo Outlook experience, and I find it passable at the best of times. Not even necessarily as the fault of Outlook.

In my experience this means network effects. Microsoft has been very successful in pushing its entire stack at enterprises, and there’s a benefit to knowing that everyone in the org has the same tools and will actually use them. Like, I can send someone docx in an email and can expect that anyone can open and edit it with instruction.

“Most people can get an email and open a document without instruction” may seem like a low bar to you, but in my experience with run of the mill enterprise it’s massively better than the alternatives.

Also, Outlook as a whole is inarguably bloated, but it’s an order of magnitude faster than Gmail at the basic act of opening and navigating between emails.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#45

Post by blibble » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 1:48 AM UTC

outlook classic is one of the few pieces of microsoft software that isn't abominably bad

it's reasonably performant, doesn't crash more than once a day, has a very customisable UI (easily altered for maximum information density), can be scripted and has zero AI slop

(cf. teams)

so of course they're sunsetting it

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#46

Post by nimish » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 1:55 AM UTC

Man I'd have just started doubling the cost every year. Wanna keep using some old software we don't really want to support? Better pay up!

You'd be surprised how quickly "it's not possible" turns into "oh we'll get right on that"

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#47

Post by EvanAnderson » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 1:56 AM UTC

quyleanh wrote: post #13

The classic Outlook is good now. Enterprise did integrate many addins to it for years. I don’t know replacing with the web based one is better or not. I guess not.

Outlook was better in the past, too. The "Advanced Find" functionality was better than any other email client I've ever used and it was gutted in 2013 (or 2016-- I don't recall). Outlook (and Office) 2010 we're the peak of the product to me.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#48

Post by p_ing » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 2:55 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #25

p_ing wrote: post #24

As noted in the article, you can still get classic Outlook which has a few more years of support. This article is clickbait.

It's still dropped from new installations, requiring users to actively go seek the classic version, and Microsoft has been nagging classic users to switch to the new Outlook for a while now. While Outlook classic is not dead and buried yet, it's firmly sitting in the casket while Microsoft is pushing down to close the lid.

Yes, it is absolutely sitting in the casket, and that's probably a good thing, security-wise.

Given it is the enterprise that "cares" about classic Outlook due to legacy COM addins, "new users" don't matter so much as they would deploy the correct version required for their userbase.

Yes, I'm discounting home users or users with their own small tenant, but there are clear and easy ways to get classic Outlook if that is what you want/need.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#49

Post by p_ing » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 2:57 AM UTC

macintux wrote: post #34

userbinator wrote: post #19

Absolutely user-hostile move. The same happened to the Outlook Web Access light version --- while it was not pure HTML, it was still much faster and more usable than the horribly bloated "modern" full version. Microsoft is slowly becoming the opposite of what it was known for, and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives. Meanwhile my ISP still offers a webmail client which doesn't require JS at all…

> and that's going to cause customers to reconsider alternatives. I'm very, very skeptical that anything short of Microsoft's bankruptcy could cause enterprises to seriously reconsider their software. It's just too convenient to pay one vendor for everything Microsoft brings to the table.

Enterprises will control which version of Outlook they deploy up to the point, in a few years from now, classic Outlook is EOL'ed for EXO. Until that point in time, Microsoft can set whatever default they want, and enterprises will deploy whatever they want to.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#50

Post by p_ing » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 2:58 AM UTC

stackskipton wrote: post #35

gerdesj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy is spot on except there is a MS webby Excel. The goal is to get you totally in the cloud and by you I mean all their customers ... all of them. On prem Exchange is being made as wanky as possible to run and has been for some years. Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom for that other than give them: "death by a thousand cuts". We have an all in one Exchange box…

>Updates are excruciatingly painful and there is no technical reason I can fathom Technical reason is they don't really want to do them and they are difficult to get right. Office365 does not run Exchange updates, so they don't get properly exercised. The only reason they haven't dropped support for in place updates is customer screaming but trust me, Exchange team would love to. Proper Office365 way to update Exchan…

Is that the proper way in EXO? SPO had individual file replacements. SharePoint stamps were not pave-and-build.