What email client is popular in large enterprises then? Last time I worked in a company like that it was all microsoft software, including outlook, by policy
Here's the thing though: Microsoft is rather heavy-handed about pushing "New Outlook" and "New Teams". New Outlook is mostly just a wrapped webapp - so slightly cleaner than the old one, but otherwise much slower and less functional. Now, guess which Outlook has had support for Copilot for the past couple months? :).
Right now it's mostly an annoyance - I have to switch back and forth couple times a day, depending on whether I need "snooze e-mail" or S/MIME at any given moment. But the latter is really a dealbreaker. Strange for a product sold to corporations, which makes me think that MS is planning to get people off e-mails entirely.
Yeah new teams is much less of an annoyance in terms of change as it was already a slow web app and users don't really expect much from it. And the UI didn't change at all.
They bogged it down with too many features and now they're trying to scrape it up by having a slightly more optimised framework, which is basically still exactly the same, it's now just based on edge instead of chrome which we all know are really the same thing under the hood anyway.
So where new teams is just a cutesy little badge on the same thing, new outlook is really a serious deprecation.
And yeah they're trying to get people off email for sure. Microsoft even have banners of "don't mail but teams" under their consultants' emails.
Makes sense from a strategic perspective to move from an open platform to something they fully control and own. It's the old lock-in game they've always played, after their initial strategy of Embracing Extend failed on email (they made a huge attempt but Google was very successful so the same and now there's a kinda duopoly stalemate they can never win)
> Yeah new teams is much less of an annoyance in terms of change as it was already a slow web app and users don't really expect much from it. And the UI didn't change at all.
They still broke some things. Instead of custom contact lists in Chat, you're supposed supposed to use the People app, and until just right now, that one didn't (!) show the presence status of each contact. It seems that very very recently they've finally fixed that, although it's still less compact and at-a-glance than the old contact list.
And "Notify when available" is annoyingly missing in New Teams, too.
If Apple can have feature parity between a Mac-ass Mac app and a Web app, why can't Microsoft? Why does Microsoft need to reduce its feature set to the lowest common denominator?
I'm of course talking of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
On the one side: Microsoft seems to be trying to work towards feature parity with New Outlook but its an application being built in the open with the most agile of agile and there's no clear time horizon of when that parity will happen. Every month or so there's new features and more feature parity (it likes to tell you that, too).
On the other side: Old Outlook grew to be an organic mess of COM components, duct tape, and glitter. Some of those COM components that people think of as "native functionality" was second-party and third-party components written by a weird grab bag of companies, including some that no longer exist. Expecting full feature parity from Outlook sounds to me like an impossible task, especially because how can Microsoft know all those third-party components? It almost seems like a case where a new brand might have been better, but it's also hard to blame Microsoft with realizing that they have a lot to lose if they kill the Outlook brand.
(I'm willing to bet S/MIME was based on fragile old IE code. I'm somewhat happy in New Outlook now, but I find I keep having to switch to Old Outlook for silly "required" corporate Add-Ins that use old APIs and haven't upgraded yet/give the impression that they might not upgrade ever.)
