Project Monarch

If MS can scale this down to replace their mobile apps, it’d be an immense achievement to go from five (iOS, Android, Win, Mac, web) versions of Outlook down to one.

@Chris. An immense achievement of the "Yes, but why?" type. They're throwing out decades of bugfixed code and sacrificing all the benefits of having native apps (speed, using standard OS conventions and integrations, etc). In exchange for... what, exactly? This is Microsoft. Issues of not having the resources to support multiple versions of the app do not apply. I really don't see the advantage here, except to be able to check off certain trendy buzz words on someone's list or to claim (falsely) lower development costs that amount to pocket change for the company.

@Glaurung
I can’t speak for the Windows side, but Apple’s pace of OS development demands a lot of resources just to keep your apps running on the latest versions. We’ve transitioned from PPC to Intel, to ARM. From 32 bit to 64 bit. From “lickable” GUIs to flat design. From the Wild West to the Sandbox. From standard res to Retina. Once they’re off that treadmill maybe they’ll have time for more and better features in Outlook and not worry about having to painstakingly port them to every OS they support.

Why?

Costs: one codebase to rule them all. (potentially iOS, Android, Linux, MacOS, Windows and the Web).

Access to programmers: There are also a lot of UX programmers who only know Web Technologies these days.

Ease of use for users: one UI to learn across all platforms.

... and an email client / calendar doesn't need to be very CPU intensive, except perhaps for search.

@Chris All the thing you mentioned happened over a 20 years life span. And they are not difficult. Especially for Outlook which requires very little if any ISA specific code.

>Sad to see Microsoft consciously eroding its
>native platforms

Nobody cares about native platforms. People care that when the IT department tells them on Yammer how to do something in Outlook, it requires five different explanations, depending on what exact combination of operating systems and Outlook versions people use, and then still only works for half the people.

An immense achievement of the “Yes, but why?” type. They’re throwing out decades of bugfixed code and sacrificing all the benefits of having native apps (speed, using standard OS conventions and integrations, etc). In exchange for… what, exactly?

I’m guessing two big driving factors here are:

the Windows version is full of Win32 legacy code. It’s newer than Word and Excel (Outlook only appeared in the mid-90s, although I’m not sure how much code from its predecessors Schedule+ and Mail it inherited), but still very old. Making fancy UI in Win32 is exhausting.
in contrast, Teams has been evolving far more quickly. There’s a lot about it I’m not happy with, and it does have that reek of “this is a web app” (for example, try scrolling through message history… the local caching is high-latency and buggy, with images frequently disappearing), but I can’t argue that things that used to be hard to do, like video conferencing and screen sharing, work just fine, across multiple platforms.

I imagine there’s a bit of an internal competition where the Outlook team got jealous of the Teams team (durr), perhaps, or more explicitly got told by a higher-up to pick a modern UI framework and move forward. It’s just a bummer that, once again, Microsoft’s own frameworks fall by the wayside. They could’ve made the Windows app UWP. They could’ve waited for MAUI to ship and make the Windows, macOS, and mobile apps MAUI.

(Perhaps MAUI being delayed-ish was another factor in this decision.)

Nobody cares about native platforms. People care that when the IT department tells them on Yammer how to do something in Outlook, it requires five different explanations, depending on what exact combination of operating systems and Outlook versions people use, and then still only works for half the people.

Thirty-seven years into the Mac, then, we’ve come full circle: the user no longer matters as long as the IT department can cut costs.

>the user no longer matters as long as the IT department can cut costs.

Users do matter. It matters that features only ship to half or a third of Outlook's users at a time, because all versions of Outlook are built on different technologies, have different release cycles, and different feature backlogs, which leads to confusion and unhappiness.

Users do matter. It matters that features only ship to half or a third of Outlook’s users at a time, because all versions of Outlook are built on different technologies, have different release cycles, and different feature backlogs, which leads to confusion and unhappiness.

That’s a false dilemma, though. “We either want to half-ass all platforms or do one shared platform well” is a choice Microsoft made that they didn’t have to make.

>That’s a false dilemma

No, it's really not. Managing complex software like Outlook, which has a ton of external dependencies, is already difficult. Managing it across five different platforms (Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, web, some of which have different sub-version, i.e. there are at least two different web versions, one built on modern technologies and a fallback version for people on older systems), using five different technologies, and thus multiple different development teams, with their own PMs and POs, and then trying to keep release cycles in sync, is essentially impossible. I can't think of a single company that does this.

This is just the reality of software development.

The idea that Microsoft is "half-assing" this because they can't keep these platforms in sync is just not a realistic assessment of the difficulty of this problem.

"Users do matter. It matters that features only ship to half or a third of Outlook's users at a time, because all versions of Outlook are built on different technologies, have different release cycles, and different feature backlogs, which leads to confusion and unhappiness."

...and as everything gets moved to web tech, we'll have confusion and unhappiness because "features" will get rolled out with little or no warning to entire enterprises all at once, regardless of platforms, so help desks will get slammed with "button was there yesterday, but not today" questions every few days because some "design" expert wants to play with pixels. ...and if you think a new "feature" hurts productivity, then you'll likely be told that you're a technophobe who "hates change." Harrumph.

A 2 Gb email client? That's hilarious. I really did join the wrong timeline.

These are funny times. The full-fledged win64 version of Office 2007 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, Published) which I still use because IT JUST WORKS requires just over one-third of the space.