Both are web apps.
It’s NIGHT AND DAY. Google did everything instantly. Outlook doesn’t.
This morning Outlook decided to spin for 30+ seconds (at which point I gave up) showing a folder. I get a modal pop-up telling me I have to “refresh” teams multiple times a day. Search always fails the first time. Always. Then it works. Some.
It’s not web tech. It’s MS not caring.
Bonus points for it running fine on Linux, too. I understand there are some missing features compared to the old one (can't recall which), but for basic corpo emailing it works perfectly for me.
I now have 0 reasons to use Windows at work, so, for once, I'll nonironically cheer MS for a job well done!
There are some people that use Outlook for...well I'm not sure what but things that go way beyond email and calendar. I've been using the web app for several years now, it's fine. When I was new in IT, I always struggled to see what the big deal was with Outlook desktop. The web mail has folders, rules, shared mailbox support, integrated calendar, etc.
What more do you need out of email?
Well, turns out a lot. People treat email has a permanent data store. I've encountered folks with multiple PST files archiving 10+ years of email. I ran into people that needed to queue up a bunch of offline emails in their outbox to send when they're on network again (ok, I kind of get this use case), and I came across all manner of horrors of COM Add-ins.
Anyway, the root of the problem is people using email for everything it was never intended to do or be. If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
Is this strange?
I'll be trying to solve some problem, half-remember an email conversation from several years ago on something relevant, and want to look it up.
This feels like the most natural thing in the world to me, and it's not like the ability to save emails is new. Why, exactly, would a forced change of habits be for my own good?
At the personal level, it wouldn't be. It makes a lot of sense, and I do the same with Fastmail.
At the corp level where it's often in M365 cloud, you've got hard limits from Microsoft on one hand (100GB primary mailbox - period), and corporate data retention limits on the other. Legal often has strong opinions on how long you are allowed to retain emails which you may or may not be able to personally override. Could be just a few years, which forces a different strategy.
I'm not sure on the details of Google, but one imagines corp workspaces have equivalent interests.
But I've seen enough corrupted PST files in my days to never trust Outlook/Exchange as permanent file storage.
Now with "New" Outlook you don't even get that, you get an ODT cache file, everything else is permanently server side in Microsoft land.
Enterprise "productivity" software is fundamentally broken.
It works both ways, I ran into a situation where a random Add-in was enabled on the web client and affecting the desktop client behavior despite not being in the list of Add-ins, and could only be disabled from the web client.
There's all flavors of "lite" apps and Firefox started as a stripped down version of Netscape.
A lot of older email apps have a prominent "offline" mode that if you accidentally activate it, basically stops the app from sending or receiving any email. I guess a lot of executives demanded the feature because they were handling all their email while on a plane without connectivity.
Good times, it feels like we're getting less and less flexible with the hackability of our corporate workflows as time goes on.
When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.
Email the protocol has this built in.
> If "new" Outlook can break some of those habits, we'll all be better off for it.
It won't, since email is in fact the best data store available to most people in enterprises (especially compared to things like Sharepoint). It might finally accelerate the move away from Exchange though. Here's hoping.
If ever there was a recipe for doing a terrible job at building software, that's as good a way to put it as I think we will ever see.
I exclusively used the web UI because it always ran faster for me, except for a small number of things it couldn't do.
It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.
Users don’t want to have to configure every app to fuck off, and native web apps (the world we _all_ live in) work way better than some hodgepodge of shit baked together by copilot that’s using unsafe calls and/or libraries.
It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and suggests pre-muting your audio.
For a native app, I'm often limited to just a small set of components and maybe images I can put on those components. Animations are out of the picture. Configuring colors is sometimes not available but always painful (every component needs it tweaked, there's no universal way to change it). I can't really change things like border margins, rounding, or adding crazy stuff like wobbles or splash effects on click. And really, the more I try to add those things, the worse experience it ultimately ends up being as the OS style and theming moves on. My best bet is keeping everything as close to native styling as possible because that has the best shot of still being usable in windows 20.
Because web apps allow configuration of everything, everything is configured. There are libraries and frameworks that do mass configuration. You can always add 1, 2, or 20 new layers and webdev has abstracted that away into a simple <MyButton /> component. And because of all these capabilities, you need a pretty beefy runtime to be assured you can do them all. Coupled with the fact that this is all also powered by a javascript engine.
Well, as I say, you can definitely have webview apps that start fast and aren't taking ten seconds to do things. Not just blank canvasses.
But when my phone is actually offline (on a plane or elevator) it beachballs when trying to find something.
Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.
I’m worried Google won’t like it someday. It’s such a hassle if they shut you off that I want to seem like the most normal user to them. Pay Mimestream, skip ads, avoid Gmail app telemetry… any incentive for Google to permit it longterm? (Like maybe you’d switch to Fastmail if they killed Mimestream… or maybe not!)
Mail.app isn't total shit. It's not great. But it doesn't fumble the basics, like Outlook for Mac, which thinks it's fine to take like 10s to show me my inbox.
I can use get new mail or synchronize in Mail.app, but always spoiled by the instantaneous Gmail app notification. Often don’t have patience to wait for Mail.app for 2FA codes (just OCR or manually type from the Gmail notification mirrored on Mac).
Also should back up a bulk of ancient emails clogging the app, might be partially my fault.
It was nice while it lasted.
https://github.com/efsavage/WinEML
Also a daily Fastmail user and it's as fast as any local mail client I've ever used.
RAM usage at that scale might not be desirable, but any engineer knows that it's the result of a tradeoff where the other options take longer to develop. I would rather have an application that uses 400 MB now than a slimmer one in several years, or one that uses less memory but is extremely slow in some corporate environments (like older Outlook).
(please don't respond to quibble about the napkin math)
Outlook was late so Schedule+ was included in Office 95 for the Win95 release and so Schedule+ got a wider retail consumer release than if it had been just included with the Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 release.
from https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/v73bk7/microsoft_...
I've been using Schedule+ 95 to keep track of my daily activities since forever. I even modified my Windows install to keep it fully compatible after WinHlp32 was nixed in Windows 10. However, it is increasingly showing its age, and there are certain aspects where I would prefer a more modern solution; I can't integrate Sched+ with my smart phone easily ...
I'm explicitly NOT looking for any cloud or web apps. I don't have reliable internet nor are all of my daily use machines fast enough to reliably, and responsively, display 90% of the bloated webapps out there. I want something lean, fast, and native for the desktop. Schedule+ uses a max of about 7MB of RAM and I don't want to go over 10-20.
Don't get me wrong, MS will enshitify anything it can to make a quick buck. They're much like Disney in that regard.
Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure.
.NET is a copy of Java
NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.
It's long-since been rewritten. Pre-SQL Server 2000 it was garbage, but it's been improved significantly since then. I'd still use alternatives given the choice, but it's a solid DB.
>Active Directory is probably based on someone's LDAP server, though I don't know for sure.
So you don't know. It was written in house, using a bunch of standardized protocols (LDAP, X.500, kerberos), though with proprietary extensions (GPOs, etc).
> .NET is a copy of Java
That's a gross oversimplification. It's arguably a rip-off after MS tried to sabotage java, but it's their own implementation.
> NT kernel is good, thank Digital/Dave Cutler for that.
Yes, MS hired an experienced OS person for it. Probably one of the best things they ever did.
---
I'm not saying MS deserves kudos or the benefit of the doubt, but they can put out good software, and these are all mission-critical examples of what they have to (having AD go down would bring a whole corporation to a halt). The problem is that with almost everything else, MS has the incentive and capability to ruin. And ruin they do...
see https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/021-expand...
and
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/bonus-the-...
Microsoft's problems are organizational. A developer can't actually do shit correctly when constantly being pushed to deliver more.
Written on my windows phone 7 series 7
- Satya Nadella
This is done by my employer but the "adoption" team at Microsoft provide the tools to do this monitoring and advertising, and they even provide the emails they send me verbatim. I have some stuff to do with the organisation around that. God I hate those guys, they are trained to be literal shills, corporate puppies. Completely brainwashed.