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Microsoft Stops Development Of Outlook Express
Jman314 writes "According to a ZDNet story, Microsoft will cease development of their Outlook Express email client. "The technology doesn't go away, but no new work is being done. It is consumer email in an early iteration, and our investment in the consumer space is now focused around Hotmail and MSN. That's where we're putting the emphasis in terms of new investment and new development work." says Dan Leach, lead product manager for Microsoft's information worker product management group. Microsoft's alternatives include, not surprisingly, the full version of Outlook."
Maybe this will cause peopel to realize that Internet Explorer and Outlook Express AREN'T the only way to use the internet. With any luck, mozilla and its ilk should be seeing a lot more customers once the EOL for Internet Explorer 6 and Outlook Express 6 hits and Microsoft either A) Requires a new version of windows for new features or B) Requires MSN subscription, both of which are alternatives that home and small business users (and probably large business users too) won't want. So let's make sure we have a very user-friendly product with plenty of advertising, eh?
My Systems
There goes the best Hotmail client there ever was. Treat hotmail just like e-mail without paying for premium POP3 service. Oh well.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Don't start up your flamebait moderation yet. I think this is sad news. OE has been my favorite email client for a long time. It starts quick, has message rules etc, and is easy to use. Yes there are other clients, but I will miss it.
Outlook is to large and too slow to start. I have a key on my keyboard for email, and I like to hit the key and have the results within seconds as opposed to tens of seconds.
Cancelling development is obviously an attempt at moving people to either Outlook or Hotmail/MSN, either of witch would yield more profit for Microsoft.
Who in their right mind would want all their email on MS servers?
Consider: What does Outlook Express allow one to do? Well, for no more than the cost of Windows, the user gets an email client that allows them to fetch data from a POP server and store it on their hard drives.
Now think about Microsoft's "next-gen tech" initiatives. Let's see, there's three, really:
1) Blackcomb, which promises an explosion of metadata (read: data bloat) and phenomenal background cycle usage (read: mandatory hardware upgrades) for not much user benefit. (Have you looked at how much metadata is stored in the "Properties" pages of a Word XP document? Good grief, there's tons. Now how often do you use that? Roughly... never? Bingo.) Not really any connection here.
2) Trusted Computing/Palladium. Again, not much connection here. (Interesting that when MS says it's interested in protecting copyrighted works, it means media distributors' copyrighted works... not the copyrights that you own regarding the email that you write, which is open for pilferage by Outlook worm du jour.)
3) Hailstorm. DINGDINGDING! We have a winner.
An' it goes a little somethin' like dis:
Microsoft has realized that it can't easily sell many more upgrades of Windows or Office. The "more stable Windows" line has been exhausted from re-use. The Office paperclip is already in 3D and can't be improved more. So, to continue reaping monopoly profits, they want to move sofware to the rental model. They drop the initial price on their software, but bill you monthly for the rest of your life, and for the same software.
Now - how can it do that? If they give you the software, they can't prevent you from using some dirty h@x0r trick to crack it and then stop paying. So, they retain much program functionality on MS's servers. You no longer own a functional copy of Word. You just own an input/output web interface to their copy of Word.
But while they're on this track - while they're pushing you to surrender your software to MS - why not convince you to surrender your documents to MS as well? They'll store the data on their servers. It will always be accessible (so long as you pay your licensing fees like a good little serf), and you don't have to worry about hard drive crashes or data loss (disclaimer: no guarantees, understand; you waived your rights through shrink-wrap.) So now you can't switch to some dirty pirate-OS like Linux without forfeiting all of your data.
Of course, Hailstorm died a PR-debacle death, because users aren't quite that stupid (or more accurately, tech-savvy users anticipated their treachery.) But Microsoft's dreams of rental pricing didn't die. After all, they have no other real improvements to offer for their core products.
Hence, no more Outlook Express.
Where's the tie? Easy. OE allowed you to store your mail on your server. But of course, Hotmail and MSN store your data on their servers. It's prepping you for the day when all of your data is on their servers.
Welcome to the future. Prepare to be assimilated.
David Stein, Esq.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
I'll take 128-bit RSA over plaintext IMAP, POP3, and SMTP anyday. Joe Six Pack isn't sophisticated enough to use GPG/PGP or Client side certs, most ISP's don't offer TLS mail services, but that little lock icon keeps his pr0n, email forwards, and industrial espionage from being snooped by big brother.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Frankly, Other than adding Outlook's stupid "Block all Attachments" Feature and setting the Security Zone to restriced by default, Something that should of been done in the first place I might add, OE hasn't changed that much since it was introduced.
The only thing that OE really needed was a Spam filter, but since Blue Mountain Arts forced MS to throw that into the toilet there isn't much else it needs that can be added.
It's simple and it works well, and it all most people need.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
HotMail and MSN are spam by definition. I suggested at CCC Camp that all "no body mail + html is spam", explaining that it is not necessarily my idea and got booed. A happy note is one of the people that made this all possible (that is Unix ofcourse) showed support in this method while strongly balking at other filtering methods as 'censorship'.
If you were there you know who i am and who was sitting next to me. It really is true that if html is not allowed as a 'mail medium' the spammers will not be allowed to show their presentations and/or direct you to dangerous sites. It is really that simple and if Outlook is out of the picture, spam has the great setback that has been a long time coming. This is a serious note BTW.
They stop developing "conventional" email client because they don't need it. .net/passport clusters for consumers.
OE is simple and standards-based (pop, imap) client, works like a charm with Unix mailservers. Why MS would need it?
Instead, they do their standard embrace-and-extend trick -
customer is fed up with insecurity of traditional email and spam?
Fine, we are going to have new mail client built right-into the OS, working some proprietary protocol against Exchange backend (for corp users) or against monstrous SQL Server /
No need to download another client just like with the browser. And guess what - in a little while SMTP/POP3/IMAP will become a niche, because everyone will have MS supermail on their desktops.
They are trying to do to email what IIS was going to do to the web - quetly and gradually replace open protocols.
Apache stopped IIS from monopolizing the web. What is going to stop this one?
It really is true that if html is not allowed as a 'mail medium' the spammers will not be allowed to show their presentations and/or direct you to dangerous sites. It is really that simple and if Outlook is out of the picture, spam has the great setback that has been a long time coming. This is a serious note BTW.
You're wrong.
Outlook is just one mail client. So long as HTML mail can be sent, it will be sent, and it will be used for spam--and for other things as well. It doesn't matter if every installation of Outlook suddenly vanishes tomorrow--there will still be HTML/MHTML mail, and there will still be spam.
Of course, to remove HTML mail would require a level of effort such that a proper check on spam would be easier to implement.
You simply can't compare PGP to SSL because they are not used for the same thing. PGP is used for the secure transmission of the mail AND the final delivery, but SSL only protects the final delivery. To that extent, a lot of webmail providers don't even give you a choice to use PGP. Because the transmission is still through SMTP, and it is not secured by PGP, your information is not protected even if you use webmail.
Maybe this will cause peopel to realize that Internet Explorer and Outlook Express AREN'T the only way to use the internet. With any luck, mozilla and its ilk should be seeing a lot more customers once the EOL for Internet Explorer 6 and Outlook Express 6 hits
.NET, and so forth. I normally kept OE6 set to display messages as plain text, disabling HTML. I've heard plenty of whining about Outlook Express security, but the majority of "security" issues were caused by idiots opening executable attachments.
My primary browswer is Mozilla. My second choice is Opera. Internet Explorer is a distant third. I've got bootable Linux, *BSD, and BeOS OS systems. I'm no Microsoft shill.
For e-mail clients, I had been using Outlook Express and just switched to Outlook in the last week. I have fairly demanding e-mail needs with several domains, multiple e-mail addresses, list subscriptions, and so forth. I tried quite a few shareware and public domain e-mail clients and found all of them lacking in one critical way or another. The list included the Mozilla e-mail client, Eudora, PocoMail, The Bat, and Pegasus Mail. Most had usability issues.
At least two of the clients pretended to have imported all of my messages in all of the folders (probably about 70,000 messages for the last 7 years sent and received) only to have failed to import a substantial portion of them. No error messages were displayed during the import process. Sorry, but that's a no-go. I'm unwilling to give up my message archive for professional and legal reasons. Nor am I willing to trust a program that would silently fail in that manner.
In those years, I have never contracted a virus, trojan horse, or worm through Outlook Express. I kept it patched and up-to-date. I had it set to use the "Restricted Sites" security setting which disabled such things as scripting, Java, ActiveX,
All of that said, I'm not blind to the faults of Outlook or Outlook Express. It was idiotic for Microsoft to include scripting of any kind for incoming messages. What were they thinking? Making an e-mail client that would retrieve from web sites without the user's permission was responsible for many people telling spammers "hey, my address is live!" The inability in OE to pick up from multiple mailboxes and have each go to its own folder is a glaring fault. There are, of course, other flaws and foibles.
All in all, though, Outlook Express was a damned good e-mail client for me. It had a well-designed user interface, was reliable, and served my purposes, and those of millions of other users, very well. Maybe this will spur on the development of other clients to the point that they rival or exceed Outlook Express, but right now, OE6 is still one of the best Windows e-mail clients available.
-- Wizards for the lame, and straight forward for us techs?
Don't you think it would be better if they wrote straight forward apps for everyone so you didn't need wizards in the first place?
The need for "wizards" is a sign of usability problems.
I'm assuming this was modded funny because it's so stupid.
If that was how messages were rated, yours would have been a +5 Funny.
Bundling software was illegal because everyone uses Windows, so they were leveraging their monopoly.
And now they want to leverage their monopoly on Windows to get people to use Hotmail and MSN -- two Microsoft online services that compete with other companies' offerings.
Not everyone uses MSN, in fact probably less than 1/4 of computer users do, so it's not illegal.
There was a time when "probably less than 1/4 of computer users" chose Internet Explorer as their browser, but Microsoft's bundling of that browser changed that.
If OE sucks, then the consumer is free to change to something else.
No they are not. The average consumer does not know where to find another mail client. They don't know how to install it. They don't know how to configure it. They think that 99% of the software downloaded over the net has viruses in it or is part of some clever ploy to steal their credit card number. They are scared that installing new software will "break" their computer and that they will have to take the computer back to Best Buy, pay the service department $150, and then find out that the "tech" wiped their hard drive and did a fresh install of Windows to "fix" the problem. If it's so damned easy to "change to something else", why did Netscape go ballistic when Microsoft started bundling IE with Windows and why is IE now the dominant browser?
But your last sentence makes no sense anyway in the context of this discussion. The point of this discussion is that Microsoft is discontinuing OE and is, instead, pushing future Windows users to sign up for MSN/Hotmail. So there won't be a version of OE, whether it sucks or not.
I wish that a few large, influential companies would stand up to Microsoft and call them on their lame business strategy: closed, proprietary standards that keep everyone else out of the game. Microsoft simply does not compete on innovation. Why doesn't this get more press? Why does the main stream media not criticize Microsoft more often? They appear to be going out of their way to keep data formats and protocols both closed and unnaturally complex just to keep other systems out of the game. I think that alone says that they recognize that their software is not superior!
I work at a large Fortune 100 company and we use Lotus Notes as our groupware. I hate Lotus Notes: it has the worst user interface I've ever encountered, is fairly buggy, and just generally kind of sucks. Everyone at work wishes we'd switch to Outlook! In my mind, that's the only advantage Lotus Notes has: it's not Outlook! That's all Microsoft wants: a few large influential companies to use Outlook so they can play the vendor lock-in card, start changing standards, and have another Office-like monopoly on their hands... but with email.
The Internet Explorer monopoly is scary enough. Now Microsoft is working on email. Microsoft is working very hard at destroying the openness of the Internet; they want to own the Internet.
Do you know about 'one pixel images?'
Apparently Microsoft does and hence Outlook 2003 filters images out by default to protect privacy. That being said, its merely a one click effort to put the images back in.
Imagine that, a sensible idea to get the best of both worlds that doesn't involve putting a blanket ban on HTML mail.
OK, I'll bite... I would love to know who this "design rule" is attributed to, because having "two modes of operation" like what you're suggesting is demonstrably not a good thing. (I'd cite sources but it's late, and hey, you didn't.)
It's not at all impossible to have an application that's accessible to both beginners and expert users. It's just that the beginners need a bit more hand-holding: dialog boxes, explicit menu items, etc... while experts, in a well-designed app, should be able to accomplish stuff faster and more efficiently via direct manipulation, shortcut keys, and operations that are a bit more hidden to new users. But you don't *hide* advanced options, and you definitely don't have two modes... keep the advanced options there, and make as much stuff reversible as possible so users will feel more comfortable poking around and trying things to get the hang of it. In most apps today, much more is technically undo-able than apps generally allow.
And keep in mind that beginners and expert users are both in the minority for the kind of complicated, probably often-used application like an e-mail client. The majority of users will be some level of intermediate, since beginners don't stay beginners forever, but most don't ever become experts. It's your basic bell-curve thing. But if you think about it like that it doesn't make sense to design only for one extreme or the other, or as you're suggesting, both.
Anyway, I'm just spouting Alan Cooper here... go get About Face 2.0 and read it. You will learn much. He's usually right on the money, even if he does have a tendency to point out all the stuff Microsoft does right (and yes, they do many things right UI-wise, which makes sense when you remember that they spend way more money on usability testing than anyone else.)
Anyway, bedtime for me.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
Any image can be used as a tracking device, it doesn't have to be a 1x1 pixel size image to track you.
That is why Outlook 2003 blocks ALL images by default.