Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365 • Hacker News Board

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#11

Post by perching_aix » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:19 AM UTC

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.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#12

Post by layer8 » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:20 AM UTC

I believe that Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with that forced migration, at least in the Windows enterprise world. It’s a bit like if they were replacing Excel with a half-baked version of Google Sheets.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#13

Post by quyleanh » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:20 AM UTC

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.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#14

Post by sshine » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:21 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#15

Post by superkuh » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:21 AM UTC

Microsoft and the other megacorps hate email. It's a wildly successful federated open protocol. They don't control it. They are all doing everything in their respective powers to turn email into a proprietary experience.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#16

Post by userbinator » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:22 AM UTC

CuriousRose wrote: post #2

Can’t wait for my 75 year old father to call me for tech support when the app auto-migrates, changes layouts, corrupts the mail profile or requires sign in for licence validation. Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse).

Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse).

Turn off automatic updates.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#17

Post by hahajk » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:26 AM UTC

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…

I've worked in places with both. I always have my own notes/planner system using text files. Being able to use weblinks to reference emails is a killer feature of even the most ascetic web client. My outlook messages always got lost in the sauce even with folders. (And searching in Outlook was always bad for some reason.)

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#18

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:28 AM UTC

Now, if they could just drop Outlook and Teams…

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#19

Post by userbinator » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:29 AM UTC

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 it's been like that for nearly 3 decades, proving that it is absolutely possible.

Re: Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365

#20

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 12:30 AM UTC

sshine wrote: post #14

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…

> 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…