Javier Soltero: The Outsider Microsoft Tapped To Reinvent Outlook (windowsitpro.com)

v3rgEz writes: In a wide ranging interview, IT Pro talks with Microsoft's Javier Soltero about his plans to help Redmond get its groove back when it comes to email, walking a fine line between keeping traditional Outlook users (and IT administrators) happy while radically reworking software that hasn't seen a huge shakeup since 2003.

Comments

Re:just go ahead and call it ReInvent

[dreamchaser]

The Magic 8 Ball says: "Outlook not so good."

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

"while radically reworking software that hasn't seen a huge shakeup since 2003."

Oh yeah, because sane people really want THAT! Particularly if the "huge shakeup" is only being done because the software hasn't had a "huge shakeup" since n number of units of time. I'm sure the new Outlook is going to be great!

Re:Sigh

[swb]

If 2013 Outlook is any indication of the direction it's going, it's going to be awful. Even though the basic Outlook application has really only undergone cosmetic changes, 2013 seems to try harder to gloss over and obfuscate parts of the user interface, which I'm sure will result in a usage metrics which show that nobody uses those features they can't find, so let's eliminate them.

I've made my person peace with Outlook, though, and despite all the things that are awful about it, I find it oddly useful. I dread what I expect will be a masturbatory exercise in visual design which will reduce Outlook to a cell-phone level of feature devolution and touch-friendliness which eliminates its quirky usefulness.

I also really hate the relentless level of user interface churn for the sake of style and visual design in almost everything. I think a measure of incremental user interface improvement can be made, especially as display sizes and technologies change, but too often UIs change because some new trend hits the world of graphic design. It's completely frustrating as a user and most often doesn't really improve usability in any salient way.

Re:Really?

[Chas]

Outlook isn't the fucking problem, exchange and its bastardised architecture is.

No. Outlook is also a fucking problem.

The architecture of the data stores is an ongoing cluster-fuck.
A single-file data file-based data store that's simply allowed to grow into obscene, unstable, performance destroying sizes.
More-over, if you crash one of the files, your chances of actually recovering anything is somewhere between "Pray for a miracle" and "Just start over".