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.
That time never existed, there were plenty of subgroups inside Microsoft that wanted to make useful software.
Plenty of people still in there that do.
But it's never been a general policicy of Microsoft that turned into actual culture and actions.
Because that would require a general vision in that direction, which would imply we would never have one version out of two of Windows (Me, Vista, 8, 11...) that looks like a prototype.
We would not have the mess of UI with thousands of toolkits, the infamous env var windows staying unusable for decades, the right click "more option" in W11 that changes theme mid-flight.
We wouldn't have had the awful windows media player that couldn't read anything without a pack of spyware installed in the 90'. Or IE6 being frozen into obsolescence. Or ads in the start menu.
Teams file sharing and chat would not suck. Word would not destroy your layout because you move an image on pixel on the left. Access wouldn't produce the most corruptible db ever. The File explorer would not start in 7 seconds randomly in some machines (see last twitter trend), and its search would actually be useful.
The wizard to fix your internet issues would have solved a problem at least once. MS would not allow tons of crapware to be installed by 3rd party. Python in the windows store would not have been made non standard.
We wouldn't have to wait 2020 to have an upgrade to the terminal. The registry would be self documenting. Skype wouldn't have been destroyed after being bought. You would be able to get to your user directory easily out of the box. Cortana would be useful. Surface wouldn't run to crawl because they would be optimized for their hardware.
I can continue like that for hours.
Because those are not subtle issues. There are other teams at Microsoft that would never let that happen.
The priority of MS is to conquer the market. At some points it meant being a bully. Now it's to pretend to be FOSS BFF. It's always been about getting devs on the platforms, and business on the hook.
But at no point in MS history has been ever been, when you at the actual results, making good software.
Good software like .Net, AoE 2 or Excel were made by the few of their accidentally amazing team.
>Word would not destroy your layout because you move an image on pixel on the left
I swear every time someone tells me that LibreOfficie is simply not up to standard, I think of how much more sane its handling of floating tables and images is. Also,
>AoE 2
A company they killed to make the next monthly report of Xbox look nicer.
> We would not have the mess of UI with thousands of toolkits, the infamous env var windows staying unusable for decades, the right click "more option" in W11 that changes theme mid-flight.
> We wouldn't have had the awful windows media player that couldn't read anything without a pack of spyware installed in the 90'. Or IE6 being frozen into obsolescence. Or ads in the start menu.
> Teams file sharing and chat would not suck. Word would not destroy your layout because you move an image on pixel on the left. Access wouldn't produce the most corruptible db ever. The File explorer would not start in 7 seconds randomly in some machines (see last twitter trend), and its search would actually be useful.
> The wizard to fix your internet issues would have solved a problem at least once. MS would not allow tons of crapware to be installed by 3rd party. Python in the windows store would not have been made non standard.
> We wouldn't have to wait 2020 to have an upgrade to the terminal. The registry would be self documenting. Skype wouldn't have been destroyed after being bought. You would be able to get to your user directory easily out of the box. Cortana would be useful. Surface wouldn't run to crawl because they would be optimized for their hardware.
> I miss the time when Microsoft wanted to make useful software.
This move seems to be in line with the Microsoft I know. They have always done it - ruin good things. There have been many MS products over the years and they have all turned to shit. As soon as Microsoft did something good, they always come out with a new version that is terrible. It's the most Microsoft thing ever, in my opinion.
MS is such a behemoth it doesn't really need to try. They know a captive audience of Windows and Office users are just going to use whatever they build because it's there, not because it's better than the competition.
Why pay for an email client when you have Outlook? Why pay for Slack when you have Teams? Why pay for cloud storage when you have OneDrive?
Could make the same argument for any giant corporation really: they don't need to innovate to survive, they don't need to do better to survive, they just have to keep using their muscle and their size to stay ahead.
> In other words, it injects spam, but the spam is special because you can't delete it.
During this week, I had a client approached me to build him a Spam Reporter Outlook add-in. He wanted the add-in to be cross-platform (Windows, macOS and Web). I started working on the project by creating a new project in Visual Studio 2022 and choosing Outlook Web Add-in as a template. Once the new project was created and ready, I pressed F5 to run the boilerplate, "Outlook.com" was launched in the browser (Edge) and it took forever to load! The loading spinner keeps turning.. then I realized, there was an error in the code and the execution was held until I choose 'Step Forward'. I was really puzzled why a fresh project could crash in the first attempt, then I quickly noticed the error was not in the project's code but in another .js file that was loading in Outook.com tab, checked the js URL just to find the domain it belongs to is unusual (at least for me),it reads something like "https://www.taboola.com/loader.js". To add insult to injury, this file was reloaded every time I clicked on a different email, it drove me crazy when I realized this "loader.js" was actually an ad injector, there was plenty of spammy ads on the right side of each email opened. Somehow, I was able to block this whole garbage by simply accessing the "Network" tab, find this .js devil then blocked it. Only then, I could continue to work on this project peacefully!
It runs in the browser to allow for more options regarding interoperability. When Outlook is a web app and Teams is a web app you can throw components from one into the other anywhere on the screen. It also saves a lot of money building apps this way. This is the case for all apps built by Microsoft and the trend is not going to change.
In Microsoft, all product managers care about is shipping more features, because that's the only way they can move their career in the company forward. Do yourself a favor and just don't use Outlook for personal stuff. Microsoft has never aimed to make a good impression on the consumer market. They only care for enterprise and that's how they build all of their software.
The difference is this is proprietary and you have to maintain it plus train every new employee on it till the end of time. I'm sure you've noticed Microsoft's direction is to use more and more public tools in their software and avoid less popular and proprietary tools (even their own). It's done to reduce costs of both development and training.
They have no regard for the outcome of this approach when it comes to software UX because most of their customers don't get to choose the software they use (enterprise). The apps just need to be good enough to sell to company management.
It's a very good business model and only surprising if you consider MS to be a software company more than they are a money making company.
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.
For me, copying to the cloud is a deal-breaker (I switched to proton mail for a reason!). Fortunately, there's Thunderbird. I don't trust Microsoft not to do dodgy Google-like things with my data at this point.
> 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.
Even if I personally use Thunderbird, I'm very much inclined to agree! It's a very usable!
That said, I'm kind of partial to the idea of just running something like Roundcube and figuring out a way to have a desktop wrapper around it, e.g. the same way how an app like Mattermost/Slack/Discord can work either in the web or locally. While the resource usage would be like the typical Electron app's, at the same time I like having a consistent UI experience wherever I am more and more, especially with self-hosted software when possible.
Edit: actually wasn't too hard to do this with Electron, however might need to find a webmail that has good support for multiple mailboxes. RainLoop seems to support multiple accounts, but has a dropdown for switching users, not sure how I feel about using the Nextcloud Mail app which has the UI I'd like (a list of accounts to the side, alongside the folders for each), but would couple things to Nextcloud.
I wish I knew about this when I set up my grandmother's new computer earlier this year. She has gotten used to using windows mail and I had to explain to her how to tell the difference between her own emails and ads that look exactly like her own emails.
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.