Updates on the new Outlook for Windows

Jamies666I completely agree with your assessment.  I understand the desire to phase out VBA.  They've been doing it for over a decade now, it's obvious the direction they are going.  But they are replacing it with automation technologies that cost more or are incomplete and do not allow the same level of automation that VBA did.  Certainly some of this is due to security issues -- it's understandable to restrict access to the file system for example.  But it goes much further than that in that the internal object model of the document is not fully fleshed out.  Sure, Microsoft will post "what do you need" type blog posts, similar to this Outlook blog, assuring us that they want to bring over the most popular features.  But that's the catch.  It only will make the cut if a large majority of users demand it.  Thus, Office gradually decreases in usefulness.  One of its best features has always been its extensibility.  We've had HTML+JS plugins now for Office Online for a very long time.  It's not like Microsoft doesn't know what the landscape looks like.  They just refuse to bring future integration to the same level of feature parity as old integration.  They will also continue to increase prices and find new ways to monetize and move more and more from local PC processing to cloud processing and further lock us into unfavorable agreements.

This is not what partners do, this is what VCs do when they acquire new companies.  Microsoft is at a weird place where they are gradually neglecting a huge number of flagship products while emphasizing all their effort on Azure etc.  At the same time, the industry is using less and less of their specialized cloud technologies, favoring frameworks that run in containers or open rather than proprietary technologies.  Microsoft will not be able to distinguish itself nor survive if it just devolves into another platform provider that doesn't do anything interesting, unique, or special.  Back to Office, if it's just a bunch of web apps (whether running in a browser or WebView2 -- makes no difference), why wouldn't I just use Google?  What's the distinguishing factor that makes it better?  There used to be an easy answer -- it was far more powerful, easier to use, and worked the same online or offline.  Now it's gradually becoming more difficult to answer that question.