MicrosoftChrisSmith_FWPBIDevAt $30/user/month, Copilot is going to flop once management at early adopters realize it's not going to actually replace headcount (that is currently what they are banking on). Very few tech innovations create that kind of efficiency. Especially one that still requires so much manual massaging and can't be trusted to not "hallucinate." I don't know if the New Outlook is a copilot decision as much as it is that the old timers that built Outlook are all retiring and the new generation of developers can't handle C++ and native development as readily as web technologies, so MS is super anxious to make the web version the only version to try to gain development efficiency. I get the thinking, but I think it's a bad idea. One of the differentiating factors for Office is that the desktop apps are super fast, memory efficient (relatively), and powerful native apps. If I'm going to get a limited, slow web app as a replacement, why would I just not use Google Workspace? It's cheaper. Office 365's competitive advantage doesn't exist without the native apps. It's truly a strange decision. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against the cloud, Exchange Online is absolutely fantastic compared to the on-prem days, but the web apps just are not nearly as good. It's just a fact. And I posit that they can never be as good, because despite over ten years of development, there is no web GUI framework that feels nearly as good as native. You only need to look at Teams to see this. Teams just feels off. Sometimes it's hard to articulate, but it's because it's a wrapped web app. A lot of desktop conventions just don't translate. There is the loading spinner EVERYWHERE. It's kind of sluggish. It uses more memory than it has any right to. It's just not as good as a native app (think back to previous generation chat apps that were all extremely snappy, used little resources, and got out of your way so you could work).
