undefined | Better HN

0 pointsjclulow4y ago0 comments

From their perspective, is it really _broken_? If you're Microsoft, especially Ballmer's Microsoft which accounts for most of those 25 years, who cares about a handful of hostile UNIX nerds on some mailing list -- they're not going to switch to using Outlook and we want to discredit and destroy their software anyway.

From the perspective of market fit and success, there are countless less-technical business users who swear by Outlook. They are not familiar with anything other than the kind of endless thread top-posting in odd encodings that Outlook all but ensures users will do -- that's e-mail to them. Why stop selling it to them?

To be clear, I loathe all of it and I haven't used client Windows for more than a decade. When I used to support small business IT customers back then, Outlook was by far my least favourite tyre on the raging intergalactic rubbish fire. But it's not hard to see why they don't care that Outlook is the way it is.

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

neelc4y ago

> From the perspective of market fit and success, there are countless less-technical business users who swear by Outlook.

And I find Outlook painful enough that I use Windows Mail at work. That only because my team disabled EWS for using about anything else.

> They are not familiar with anything other than the kind of endless thread top-posting in odd encodings that Outlook all but ensures users will do -- that's e-mail to them. Why stop selling it to them?

Ahhh, the old "embrace, extend, extinguish" by breaking other email clients among other things. For Corporate America (as opposed to startups), Outlook is email.

Well, Gmail, Yahoo, Thunderbird and Roundcube can view Outlook-composed email fine now since IE stagnated and Firefox/Chrome beat it. (assuming Outlook used IE for rendering, I don't work on the Outlook desktop client and joined after Edge went Chromium).

And Outlook still can't inline post, because Microsoft borked the "standard" and built an email client for corporate users not Unix nerds.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse