The Perils of CRIMPing

Posted by Ken
Jun 30, 2015 at 05:33 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
Ken wrote:
>If we’re on the topic of moaning about MS (though I’m not an MS hater, I
>like my Win7 a lot), another bugbear of mine is the recent update to the
>Outlook Web App interface (both Office 356 and other varieties).
> >I find it very cumbersome designwise and painfully slow to use. What
>used to take 10 min now takes 30 min, and I’m just talking about reading
>and answering emails.
> >I have finally managed to switch back in recent days to the “light
>version” (which they seem to have deliberately degraded in order to
>discourage people from downgrading, e.g. the search function) in all my
>browsers and devices, but it wasn’t easy, took weeks, as Outlook would
>just ignore that choice (I tried deleting cookies, signing in and out
>etc. nothing worked).

I do not hate MS as a habit, but sometimes I just do not understand what they consider progress, although the same could also be said for Adobe, Apple and Google given some of the “updates” they have recently released. I currently use Win7 and while I miss a few things from XP, I am comfortable with it, especially as ti can be customized to my liking.

OWA and Outlook.com, however, are a whole different kettle of fish. I never took to OWA, and found Outlook.com to be a slight improvement for my workflow, but neither are really a good substitute for the desktop client version of Outlook (2013 version excepting). I find it just fascinating that as much as many software companies are moving their product lines to cloud-based applications, the lack of a good web-based email client is depressing. I have grown accustomed to Gmail and find it mostly useful, but I just cannot find many good alternatives if you host your own domain and do not want to subscribe to Google Apps. I do wonder if these companies really think that email is a dying form of communication. It is still the lowest common denominator of electronic communication when doing business with others, and I just do not see it going away anytime soon. I am hoping that somebody will fill this void, as I am getting tired of using RoundCube for one of my accounts.

—Ken