MicrosoftA couple-three thoughts:
1) Somewhere in these 19 pages of posts, someone said that Microsoft doesn't read this forum, and the poster provided a website that Microsoft reportedly does accept feedback from. I have my personal doubts that they pay any more attention there than they do here, but just beware that they apparently don't listen here. At all.
2) From their blurb at the top: "This update is a step towards a consistent experience across apps like Outlook, Teams, and Office.com." If you've used Teams, you'll see a similar set of icons there, arranged vertically along the left, and it's been that way for a long time. So if Microsoft indeed listened to feedback about Outlook's icons, and also wanted to maintain consistency, they'd have to change the location for icons there too. I very much doubt they will do that. Teams is a disaster of a UI--start with the fact that it always opens full-screen--and Microsoft has shown no sign, nada, zilch that they'll ever fix that.
3) Given this, what's your best chance of not seeing a pile of worthless icons along the left, once this evil change takes place? I guess you could slide the Outlook window part way off the screen to the left (but then it's impossible afaict to switch between email and calendar views); or you could install a different email application. I use Thunderbird on my home computer for both email and calendaring, and switch between them using tabs (which is the way God intended applications to open multiple documents, although Microsoft isn't a believer in that).
Sorry if that's not the answer you want. But given that Microsoft has never ever ever listened to user feedback (like allowing menus instead of the ribbon as a UI tool in Office), this is probably the best we can do. Because Microsoft Knows Best (or at least that's what they think).
