Microsoftmargieclinton to be fair, Microsoft are addressing some of these issues. They are adding some features back that are available in the real client and I think they want to bring a degree of feature parity.
I do think they are aware that New Outlook is half baked. I’m fairly difficult on the Outlook engineers because I know that a website, does not a desktop application, make.
You’ll never convince a person like me, who works in tech, and isn’t a youngster, that webcode hosted in a framework that plugs into the operating system isn’t a true desktop application and isn’t native.
But I do work in technology and this is one of those catch 22 situations where MSFT the corporation wins, but the customer and the engineer doesn’t.
The trend in modern tech is we fit everything. And MSFT seems to have determined that they can set down a uniform feature set that they can serve to most of their customers if they go the website route. They can also keep fewer developers who can code in native languages and keep charging the same prices for an inferior product. And because the mom and pop shop (small and medium businesses) are ubiquitous and this is how they cross platform, then they will just let everyone assume it’s the standard.
In the end we the customer continue to pay full price for what is Fisher Price software and the engineer has to hear the litany of complaints because it’s the lowest common denominator solution. Sadly they know there’s a group of us who they can never convince despite their hard work and in many cases genuine dedication to publishing a useful product.
But they have to do what they’re told. They have to buy into the lie that we all want feature parity with software that runs online, when we all want software that has the features that their Windows flagship products have. And we want it to be native code that looks, feels, and runs like it was designed for the operating system we chose to use.
TL/DR: MSFT engineers are working on New Outlook every day. They have a future target for rollout of this product and they know it has to have feature parity with what it’s replacing. But this kind of Outlook will never be a true replacement for the desktop application that exists now because it isn’t a real desktop application, rather a website in a box playing pretend.
