Last year Microsoft released Office 2007, which included a new version of Outlook that performs significantly worse than its predecessor. “After upgrading to 2007 it’s just been insanely slow,” said one user who contacted me. “I can barely write an email, Outlook will hang while I type.” There were several problems, mainly to do with Microsoft’s latest attempt at desktop search and its interaction with large mailboxes. A couple of weeks ago Microsoft released a patch to fix these issues; it improves matters considerably, but Outlook 2007 is still less snappy than its predecessor, and still tends to corrupt its offline store if you shut down your PC before it is fully indexed.
The context of these Outlook problems is Microsoft’s ongoing battle with Google for market share and mind share. There are a number of ironies here. Why is full-text search built into Outlook 2007? Surely the popularity of Google’s Desktop Search was a factor here, with Microsoft keen to wean users away from its competitor’s add-on. Google may have inspired the very feature that caused Outlook 2007 to choke.
In theory, the rich feature set found in Outlook combined with its full offline capability is meant to persuade us that web applications cannot yet replace their desktop cousins. In practice, Outlook 2007 has been an advertisement for web email, whether that is Outlook Web Access, the browser-based client for Microsoft Exchange, or internet-hosted email from third parties such as Google.
I am reminded of the reason migrating to Outlook and Exchange was such a joy a decade ago. Despite Outlook’s quirky interface, it solved the problem of synchronisation for users with more than one PC. You can switch from desktop to laptop, or zap Windows and reinstall, with no worries about losing email, and with full offline access.
Synchronisation is good, but Outlook 2007 exposes its downside, which is the complexity of the client. Another factor is the growing size of mailboxes. This is a point that Microsoft apparently does not understand. “Outlook wasn’t designed to be a file dump, it was meant to be a communications tool,” said Microsoft’s Jessica Arnold, commenting on the performance problems with large mailboxes. On the other hand, quickly searching large email archives is one of the selling points of Google Mail. It all suggests that synchronising a huge mailbox no longer makes sense. Synchronisation is good, but always online is better. Perhaps it is time to ditch Outlook completely.
