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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."
"The attrociously insecure program won't go away, but no new work is being done. It was our best attempt at writing a simple email client in an early iteration, and our investment in the consumer space is now focused around agents that will allow us to more effectively execute our SPAM campaign and strengthen our monopoly: Hotmail and MSN. That's where we're putting the emphasis in terms of new investment, development work, and worm targets that will give your IT guy an incredible head ache."
They think webmail is going to be more popular than imap, or pop3 mail boxes. So they are going to intergrate a Hotmail mail box into the next version of windows.
keanmarine.com
What's that sound? Ahhhhh, worm and exploit writers around the world can rejoicing...
I they've got them to stop development.
Blockwars: go play.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
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
Oh, ok... so what you're saying is we no longer have outlook express... it's now part of the OS and we can't de-couple them... it's an integral part of the OS... honest your honor!
Seriously... They're doing with outlook express, what they did with Internet Explorer... except this time, they are bundling outlook functionality with their Web business, instead of their OS... Same shit different pile...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
So OE will never be able to filter by header, forcing people to live with spam. It's just like IE - leave some critical, easy to add features missing, then stop development. It's like they're trying to annoy people into upgrading to a new version of windows to get the latest email client and web browser.
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...)
Does that mean they won't bundle an email client in Windows anymore? That's one good thing I see coming out of this. Hopefully a good, simple to use, secure, and free email client will be able to fill the gap.
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.
The full version of Outlook is still supported
Outlook Express is no longer supported
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Who in their right mind would want all their email on MS servers?
I really liked OE, even though it had its plethora of security issues. It was not as bloated as Outlook, and believe it or not is a really good email client. Clean and simple enough so our older employees can handle it. I don't think I want to upgrade our workstations to use Outlook, should look for a good replacement. Any nice, powerful and free email clients out there?
Don't worry though, Microsoft will find new ways to make IT staffers suffer.
Well, guess who isn't stopping their development?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/
Version 0.1 is still better than Outlook Express ever was. Anyone with any experience with the Mozilla products, especially Firebird, knows that each incremental version increase brings loads more functionality, features and options.
So while I would shed a tear over Outlook Express going away, truth is, a rat's ass I do not give.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
THere's a whole heap of vulnerabilities yet to be implemented to give a fully rich and satisfying "user eXPerience".
Stopping myself...Abort (core dumped)
Catch Up? Like gone past?
I hate outlook and outlook express. At my real job, I have to use Outlook.
At my consulting Job I use evolution. Ah so much better. Then I have to go out and support (I do IT support) for outlook. YUCK. Express was better. Made more sense. When is MS gonna learn that there should be 2 ways to do things: Wizards for the lame, and straight forward for us techs?
What if MS attempted to turn every single one of their programs into something like the lease-this-because-you-can-no-longer-buy-it. What would many do. Just because they've announced this means little. What they should be announcing instead of waisting everyone's time, should be, that they're going to reaudit ALL versions of Windows for security holes.
That would impress me. I wonder what would MS do if everyone just got pissed and did some form of protest to the tune of "secure this now or we won't buy". It would be a sys admins nightmare to migrate machines over to other OS' but in the long run, it 'could' (note the could instead of unproven WOULD) save companies much needed dollars.
As for the outlook article, to be honest didn't read it because I don't use it, nor does anyone in my company.
MoFscker
The Mac version was last updated in.....damn, I keep on top of this stuff but it's been what...3 years since the last update? Microsoft has been slowly reducing the number of Mac apps over the past few years (it seemed to coincide with their new 'commitment' to the Mac around 2000 or so) Apple had no other choice but to put out Mail.app, to fill the gap. IE is gone, but everyone in the Mac community felt it was dead long before Safari came out - not getting an update for years at a time usually leaves that impression.
Oh well, I guess it is a strategic move to isolate themselves for blame and constant embarassment over their inability to put out a secure app. Almost everytime "new, crippling virus" is mentioned, you hear "exploits a vunerability in Outlook Express" in the same sentence.
So Outlook express will go away. I'm not going to shed many tears over it.
Still, how long will it take before the users who download Outlook Express stop hunting around on the net and installing it? I still have people reaching around in their directory (or desk drawer) of important stuff installing horribly old versions of Netscape 4.x (where x is a very small number) so they can use it's email reader.
Most of the users are bound to the one product they chose when they REALLY NEEDED it to work. During that crisis period, they put in the time and effort to get THAT product to work, and that's the extent of their software understanding. Microsoft may try to wash it's hands of Outlook Express, but I imagine a day (ten years from now)
Hey, could you look at my home computer? It seems I have an email problem.
Really? I thought that email was totally autoconfiguring on your system!
Yea, but for some reason, Outlook Express, says it can't connect to my Internet.
Arrrggghhh....
All the functionality + security features and no "click and run" worm support
Take away their free email program and they'll be FORCED to buy our commercial products! Ha!
Quick Smithers, find the Mozilla development team and kill them all!
First they're cancelling IE, and now OE.
It's like that memo making security "job #1" was real or something...
This seems a logical step given several factors:
I was an OE user for rather a long while and it had always seemed a bit nicer interface than Outlook proper. In maybe three years, I never had a data failure and it was quite reliable. Obviously the security angle was, er, non-existent (anti-secure perhaps) but it felt fast and mostly did what I told it.
But I'm an Evolution user now, so OE won't be missed. Better for all of us, if you ask me.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
SMTP and Webmail are two different matters entirely.
SMTP has to do with how the mail is transfered between servers.
Webmail/POP3/IMAP have to do with how the end user reads mail in their inbox
Also webmail is quite capable on non-windows servers
SquirellMail (Open source imap webmail) is a much better interface than hotmail ever was
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
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.
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!
Here's an interesting thing to note ... ever try removing Outlook Express after installing Outlook?
... why do I need Outlook Express installed?" --uninstall
... when you launch Outlook after removing Outlook Express, you'll get a message indicating that Outlook NEEDS Outlook Express in order to view email. Go ahead and scratch your head for a few minutes on that one, but its true.
... how is it then, that Microsoft can continue to offer Outlook while stopping development of Outlook Express? (Perhaps some merging of the development resources going on there.)
"Hey, I've got Outlook
Here's the catch
SO
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Oh yeah! Sounds great! Let's see, umm... me@hotmail.com. Nope, hmm. me2@hotmail.com. MMMh. me2dood@hotmail.com. Eh! is anything available!? meetooooyoudamnpigbilly@hotmail.com. ARRGGHH how can that be taken! OK try this: me_bork_bork_bork_boogliachoo129@hotmail.com ... Finally. OK, login here, WHAT? spam already?
Damn those pesky terrorists
I've been using webmail exclusively for a year now, so I agree. We use SquirrelMail. It's a great webmail program with tons of plugins (calendars, weather, spellcheck, translators, virtual domains, etc...) Most of our customers use it for access to their e-mail--though it doesn't stop them from using POP3 or IMAP clients if they prefer. Definately worth a look if you're interesting in providing webmail services. Oh yeah, GPL of course.
One word of warning--many of the plug-ins don't seem to work well with the 1.4 series yet. You may want to stick with the 1.2 series for a while if you need a lot of the plug-ins. Otherwise, 1.4 works great and is a bit faster.
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?
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.
Sadly, Outlook Express was far more standards-compliant than full Outlook. And that's not saying much.
Here are just some of the things that annoy the hell out of me about Outlook:
Everyone in my office uses Outlook except for myself and a few others. I've wanted to set up a newsserver to replace our current policy of cc'ing random people when trying to have a discussion. Sadly, the only Microsoft solution would have been to use Outlook Express to connect to the news server. (No, installing Mozilla/Thunderbird on everyones machines and training people to use it is not an option, sadly.)
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.
A bright sun shone above the horizon. Songbirds lilted sweetly in lush green trees, bunnies danced across the meadow, and all disease came to an end. A Microsoft spokesperson said in a press conference - "You know folks, from now on I think everything is gonna be ok."
One thing that still tends to suck these days is mail access. With the exception of Evolution and Mozilla Thunderbird, the e-mail experience is really lacking these days. Web mail is nice, but it's still really slow unless you are dealing with proprietary packages. MSN and Hotmail suck compared to what could be if the right combination of technologies were used.
With the departure of Outlook Express, a void will need to be filled and I believe that this opens the door to new alternatives. If there was a project that combined web mail, a mail client and an IM client to produce a seamless user experience no matter which component is used,I think it could blow away anything that MS has to offer. Couple that with a solid backend and a new spam proof protocol and I think e-mail would be revolutionized. As it is e-mail doesn't scale well at all when it comes to content. It should be media rich, but capable of being thinned down to be able to work within a simple text only interface. That's something that is totlaly lacking right now. There's lots of work to be done to turn e-mail into something universaly useful and valuable. Let's take this opportunity to start something now.
Un-news
Remember, this is for end/home users, not for power users.
Home users don't care about long term storage of attachments or mail.
Home users don't care for multiple accounts.
Home users don't want rich features.
Home users don't care or even understand about html vs. text email.
Personally, I agree with you. I'd never use web mail myself as my primary mail access. But (yes, I realize I'm generalizing) typical home users aren't us.
-- 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 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.
Ok... I still use Outlook Express... for one reason. I have several IMAP servers (yes, all over SSL), and in OE, I have them set to syncronize all messages, without having to go offline. I know this is not exactly the main use of IMAP, but I like it-- I don't have to download a message each and every time I view it. No, it's not a speed (bandwidth) issue-- but a latency one. Even over my home network, if it has to hit the server for each message, it's not as fast as if it's cached locally. Evolution doesn't do this, nor does Thunderbird, so far as I can tell. Or do they? And if so, how?
P.S. Please no "feature = bug in OE that I can't find anywhere else" replies. There's enough threads with those already.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
They think webmail is going to be more popular than imap, or pop3 mail boxes.
If Microsoft lets its market share for desktop-based e-mail clients slip, it could be short-sighted.
I use web-based mail at work (iPlanet/SIMS) and web-based mail (Yahoo) at home as my primary mail-reader. I have broadband in both locations and the responsiveness of web-based e-mail conpared to desktop e-mail clients is negligible.
My work-at-home CEO has satellite at home. He can't use the web-based product because the interactive sluggishness from delay and packet loss would kill his productivity. SSH-tunneled POP works great for him because his local e-mail client (Outlook) downloads new e-mail in the background and sends messages out in the background while he is composing/reading mail quickly in the foreground.
When I administered e-mail for a dialup ISP, the primary method our users preferred to access their e-mail was POP to Outlook Express or Netscape Messenger. It is painfully slow to browse through e-mail over a dialup connection. There are still millions of dialup users out there. They are the majority of users on the Internet.
If people use wireless devices in the future, their experience will be more similar to dialup/satellite than broadband, and they'll demand a product that isn't web-based-only. Some of the ideas brought to light by Central or similar technologies could satisfy both broadband/fixed and narrowband/mobile users.
Microsoft makes an excellent user interface for e-mail. They're good at that. Their enterprise/corporate customers may continue to pay for it. Other products like M2, Evolution, and Mozilla will help fill the consumer niche if they open it up. If it weren't for Microsoft's early monopoly bundling tactics vs Netscape Navigator (founded on a "beta/intro is free, production version costs money" business model), we might not have nor expect free browser and e-mail software. We're spoiled. If it weren't for security or playform supportissues, more of us Slashdotters might use Outlook Express.
-ez
PS: I lied. My primary mail reader is MH.
Does this mean MS will finally put newsgroup support in the full Outlook product? About freakin' time.
I've never spent much time with the Windows version, but the old MacOS version was superb, and I know a bunch of very savvy tech folks -- people that were generally of the Linux & Free software persuasion -- that swore by OE/Mac as their favorite mail client.
However, it has been obvious for a while that that software probably didn't have a future. Outlook Express was never updated to be a native OSX application, so you had to run it in Classic mode. That was enough to start turning away users, but I understand that even still it's fairly popular.
But I digress.
If you read between the lines here, it's not just OE that's being dropped. Consider this quote from the article:
In other words, Microsoft saw OE as their IMAP client, and so by dropping OE, they are also abandoning the IMAP mail protocol. In spite of what Mr Conn says, IMAP is a very rich protocol: it allows you to maintain multiple mail folders on the server, it allows you to keep your mail client configuration on the server, and in principle it allows you to store arbitrary files on the server.
All of this allows the user to have great mobility: leave the office and you can have all the same data available at home, or at school, or while travelling. All of this, in other words, is open competition for Exchange.
This isn't just abandoning OE, this is vendor lock-in. Microsoft is trying to steer us towards a world where you have two choices for mail access: get a Passport & sign up for MSN Hotmail, or buy a copy of Office and use Outlook to connect to your corporate or ISP provided Exchange server.
There is no room for open protocols in this worldview, and so no room for alternative servers (Sendmail, Postfix, Qmail, Exim) or clients (Mozilla, Thunderbird, Mail.app, Pine, Mutt, Eudora, etc).
The death of an open protocol is the real headline here, but both the journalist & the story submitter seem to have missed it.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Stocks in all major Antivirus vendors were down on the news.
CEO's of major Antivirus vendors were unanimous in advising their shareholders that "there's nothing to worry about - there are plenty of other Microsoft products out there..."
... to a few people at work.
--COO shrugged... Eudora
--CEO shrugged... Eudora
--CTO shrugged... Eudora
--Project Manager #1 Shuddered... (Sky is falling!!!)
--Project Manager #2 shrugged... (But he shrugs at everything, so not sure what it means.)
--IT guys #1 and #2... "Out what? Servers are up, everything running fine. Nothing is Out."
Basically, it seems to be a big, "Yeah. So?"
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...
Tools -> Message Rules -> Mail -> New -> "Where The Message is from the specified account" -> "Move it to the specified folder" ..
Damn! You learned me sumthin' new. I thought "Where The Message is from the specified account" referred to the sender's address (as in "From:").
Just to make it clear, I did notice Microsoft's casual dismissal of IMAP, but I didn't mention it for journalistic reasons. I reported the facts; this discussion inteprets them. I do agree, however, that stopping OE development is stupid and replacing it with Hotmail is really stupid, but I left that for the reader.
So you see, there can be journalistic neutrality on Slashdot!
But dropping the protocol is the story!
If things do go according to my interpretation, then the relevance of open protocols like IMAP, POP, and SMTP will be diminished, and the end result will be that all non-Microsoft mail software (both client & server) will be crowded out. This is a doomsday scenario, and I don't expect it to be quite that bad, but it seems obvious to me that this is what Microsoft is pushing for.
I think it would have been fair to press them on this angle in the article, as the significance of this is far greater than the mere discontinuation of a particular piece of software. But it sounds like you did put some thought into this, so I'll accept that it was your call to make... :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Well, I wouldn't say that evolution is behind much if at all, but it is very interesting.
IE: no tabs, no mouse gestures, no popup blocking to my knowledge, renders fonts like crap, mildly broken CSS support, broken javascript.
IE has really fallen behind in the times; Opera and Mozilla are gaining by leaps and bounds on Windows, and browsers like Galeon 1.2.10 have folks like me swooning on Linux.
Mozilla mail, Evolution and the like are now poised to become even better. With AbiWord/Open Office/Etc. getting better and better, GnuCash, gnumeric, etc....
Is this really a wise move for Microsoft, resting on their laurels?
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
But seriously folks, I've been fighting pitched battles to keep our place off of Outlook/OE and Exchange. For reasons technical, logistical, and financial.
One of the big claims that users have is "well, Outlook Express is built in. Why can't I use it?" Because
- It has a nasty set of default values that clobber our IMAP server
- Every email worm out there is designed to pull from it's address book.
- It has a tendency to take a complete dump on your settings stored in your roaming profile
- The address book has a habit of spontaneously combusting on our network.
That's why.Now they no longer have the "It's built in" excuse.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
My guess is something like this:
Scary.
Maybe they are dropping it because users wont accept advertising in their email client (OE did for 1 version but was quickly dropped perhaps people complained?) but if its on the web (in a browser) they can advertise all they like (look at the mess that what they call hotmail now)
then they can get advertisers to focus on associating users email accounts with user names and all that lovely personal information (courtesy of your "msn wallet(TM)" and "msn passport(TM)", tie that to your machines GUID and msn's cookie stealing exploits (notice hotmail.com does not exist anymore and is now a msn subdomain) and voila , you have WindowsXP 2004 marketing machine where you are not the customer any longer, you are the product and you will even hand over 299$ (cost of XP) for the privilege while assigning all your IP rights to them and their "partners".
Microsoft isnt a software company, its a marketing company that creates software.
not that it will affect me or you but you have to feel sorry for the sheep that have no idea whats going on.
cheers
A few days ago when the Paul Graham article was posted to the frontpage, I was thinking about the fact that MS hasn't implemented Bayesian filtering (or any powerful filtering) into OE.
The three possibilities I came up with were:
MS wanted to give Hotmail/MSN a competitive edge over other ISPs and mail services.
MS didn't consider it worth the money to add Bayesian filtering to OE.
MS is using Hotmail as a testbed for various versions of filtering software; by making changes and observing user behaviour, they could determine whether people generally agreed with the filters, thus roughly gauging their effectiveness. Since changing source on a central server is a faster method of deploying updates than forcing users to require a new client, Hotmail is the perfect place to test new filtering schemes.
Honestly, I thought that either the first or the third was true. Here, it turns out that the first and the second are true.
I wonder what ISPs will be left to do? I suppose they'll either have to seek out a cheap/free mail client for Windows, or switch to webmail.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!