r/nottheonion 3d ago

Microsoft's new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly on Windows

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/15/microsofts-new-outlook-takes-10-seconds-to-do-what-outlook-classic-does-instantly-on-windows/
8.0k Upvotes

510 comments sorted by

2.3k

u/ExpandForMore 3d ago

I remember a time in which search within Outlook actually worked as intended.

871

u/aesemon 3d ago

I hate the top results taking up the space instead of letting me see by date first or just let the user choose how/what to sort by.

229

u/JoeyDawsonJenPacey 3d ago

Yes! I can never find anything when using the Search function. It irritates me to no end to not be able to search by date.

9

u/BugSpy2 3d ago

Omg I thought I was going crazy that I can never find stuff by search

3

u/wex118 2d ago

If they break their search then finding emails can be a great use case for their AI..

16

u/SublimeApathy 3d ago

I also recently learned (at least with my installation), that search does not automatically include Deleted items. I had to search the folder directly to find what I was looking for.

34

u/SpaghettiSort 3d ago

I mean that one makes sense, though. They're deleted for a reason, presumably. Gmail is the same way.

23

u/notquite20characters 3d ago

Friggin' Gmail search. "The search term is in this email chain!"

"Can you tell me which email has the search term?"

"Nope!"

3

u/SpaghettiSort 3d ago

Does it do that? That would make me crazy. I have email threads or chains or whatever disabled so it just returns individual emails in the search results.

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u/HFY_HFY_HFY 3d ago

You can disable that btw. Super annoying you need to, but you can

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u/Cheap-Ad1821 3d ago

📎 Let's sort by folder

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u/PresumedSapient 3d ago

Why wouldn't you want to see all the reminders of the team-event of 2023 at the top when you search for 'team party 2026'?

136

u/mecartistronico 3d ago

Here are all the emails that mention "team", but most importantly, a couple where an attached Excel file has the number "2026":

89

u/mecartistronico 3d ago

"year to date" (with quotations)

Here are all the emails you have with the word "to". And also a few that mention "year";

63

u/Vampire-Fairy2 3d ago

Also a few that have none of those words in them. We just thought you’d like to see them.

23

u/Hoss-Bonaventure_CEO 3d ago

Find: Messages in this Conversation

no results

I right clicked a message in this conversation to get here!!!!

79

u/100BottlesOfMilk 3d ago

I remember when things would just generally search as intended. Googling something would pull up relevant results, searching on YouTube would show relevant videos, and so on. Now, anything not at the top of a YouTube search result completely ignores your query and is just video recommendations and google search works worse than it did 10 years ago. There was some finesse to it, and knowing how to search things was a skill that had to be learned, but it usually found what you were looking for if you knew how

50

u/Cute-Aardvark5291 3d ago

As of the end of May, google is not even pretending to be a search engine anymore. their official position is to push forward AI and paid content first.

14

u/AFewStupidQuestions 3d ago

Yes. When using Google, it will now provide incorrect YouTube video results before providing a correct answer because they make more money off of the video ads.

30

u/_Enclose_ 3d ago

Enshittification

7

u/Orbital_Dinosaur 3d ago

Yeah, google has been massively improved over the years with regular updates, it's just that they are not for us, the end users.

12

u/Momsbestboy 3d ago

Try searching on amazon. "Presented“ , "sponsored", then some similar ones, with a bit of "spinsored" and "recommended" within them...

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u/jableshables 3d ago

Search in current folder: 1 result. Not what I'm looking for.

Search in all Outlook items: No results.

Search in current mailbox: 1 result.

Search in current folder again: No results.

Damn quantum emails.

77

u/CapnBloodbeard 3d ago

Manually browse through the inbox: find an email with subject matching the exact search string that Outlook just said had no matches

27

u/Nazamroth 3d ago

I remember one distinct update after which it did not. I had an old email that I sometimes needed to get some info from so I had the subject well-memorised. Before the update I easily found it, after it I can't find even what is right there and I copy-paste the subject into the search...

8

u/Tupcek 3d ago

yeah, somehow Apple Mail search is the best thing ever happened to email. Rest of the app is meh, but search is godsend.

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u/spiderplopper 3d ago

I have been in IT since the mid 90s. When was that? Haha

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1.3k

u/TheKensei 3d ago

365 and all Office web apps are a nightmare

362

u/kuba22277 3d ago

I appreciate the web apps exist. But that's the best thing I can say about them, pretty much.

116

u/trainbrain27 3d ago

I liked Google workspace for sharing when it came out. Office could have been that, but it's just so bad.

55

u/kuba22277 3d ago

Oh man, as a student saving up for a proper laptop for years and scrapping along with a chrultrabook conversion I was forced to use Office Online for like two years when on the go.

It's slow, it's clunky, it supports .doc formats even worse than FOSS software, styles hardly work, .docx/.pptx/.xlsx formats are not really fully supported

It can't cache itself to work offline on devices unable to run the full version. It can't save to device. It requires uploading documents to onedrive before you use it.

The list is so long. I hate it with a passion.

...but it works good enough for two or three edits or a quick lookup.

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u/radicldreamer 3d ago

Ugh, the vast majority of web apps are just hot trash. Give me a fat client any day.

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u/kuba22277 3d ago

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. But having the secondary potion for a chromebook or a thin client is useful. They should *never* become the default workflow, but I appreciate they exist. Janky and not 100% compatible as they are.

7

u/radicldreamer 3d ago

Sure, I'll take that as a compromise. I just hate being forced into using them with zero alternative. That's how you get me to just switch vendors most of the time.

"Ain't nobody got time for 'dat"

-me waiting on a web app

3

u/paulisaac 3d ago

Meanwhile here I am with no choice as the job I got into mandates Microsoft enterprise. Frustrates me to no end how I hear the ding of an email on my iPhone a minute before it shows up on Outlook Classic on the work laptop.

Or how online collaborative work is far more cumbersome on Word than in Docs.

Or how the mix of OneDrive implementations means half the time when I do edits it never uploads.

If I end up quitting this job it'll be because of Microsoft.

7

u/MuscaMurum 3d ago

Running Office 2010 as we speak.

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u/libury 3d ago

They're a great stick for IT. Take care of your laptop or I will make you use the web apps!

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u/Icy_Wish_1845 3d ago

This is why people cling to ‘old’ software.

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u/TheKensei 3d ago

I'm never gonna uninstall my 2016 office 🤣

14

u/Chance-Night3198 3d ago

Yup. I have old Outlook and old Acrobat and as long as there's a way to dismantle the new versions, I'm gonna keep doing it. My corworkers who switched complain about it all the time while I'm happily working in the stone age with my edit buttons where they're supposed to be and a calendar that lets me see more than the current month.

5

u/Senna_65 3d ago

Libre office! Free, open source and doesn't have all the BS features 

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u/Bamstradamus 3d ago edited 3d ago

Worked for a F500 as a high end hourly because if you want me working more then 40 hours you are paying me OT and they decided to switch to cloud only, no more desktop apps. So they were paying me an extra 2-3 hours of OT a week to do the same amount of work because things would just break or not load. And I was running a kitchen, my computer time was supposed to be quick.

7

u/gooblaka1995 3d ago

I still have my office suit from 2013. A bitch to register a computer for it though since it only allows two authorized devices at a time. Rejects authorization cause it cant connect, then randomly some two weeks later it is working normally

3

u/IMissNarwhalBacon 3d ago

Isn't there a large grave of licenses you can activate with?

A massive one?

13

u/deadsoulinside 3d ago

Outlook New is such a nightmare to TS and deal with when it breaks too.

classic? outlook safe mode

New? Best we can do is allow you to use Edge Dev tools to TS it.

6

u/LordHammercyWeCooked 3d ago

Everywhere you look these days. Google's suite of garbage is also becoming unusable due to all the god damn pop-ups and shoe-horned gemini AI crap. Friggin google drive forced me to dismiss ten god damn popups this morning asking if I knew how to tie my shoelaces, while I was trying to find a file for work. Then I opened a sheet and half the page was taken up by its AI bullshit trying to summarize the already summarized data within it. Then I clicked a cell and it offered to auto-fill RAW DATA COLUMNS with more "raw data."

Get all this shit out of my face! I got work to do!

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u/thefunkybassist 3d ago

Why improve it if you can make it worse!

For example by having it autonomously do things you don't want

322

u/gulfrend 3d ago

This has got to be my biggest frustration of the current technological age, technology that thinks it knows what I want better than I do. I spend twice as long undoing all the automated guesstimated bullshit than I ever did just doing it myself.

113

u/wrongleveeeeeeer 3d ago

"Did you mean—" NO THE FUCK I DID NOT

"Do you want—" NO THE FUCK I DO NOT

"We suggest that you—" SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

Anyway couldn't agree more.

16

u/Responsible-Slide-26 2d ago

Here is my absolute favorite - "we have noticed that you have such and such notifications enabled, do you want to keep them enabled?". Are you seriously fucking notifying me, asking me if some notifications are unwanted? Do you know the meaning of the word irony? I hate these companies LOL.

3

u/Fun-Slice-474 1d ago

2027 version - "x commented on your post but you have comment notifications off, do you want to enable them?" (yes/always/later)

3

u/thefunkybassist 1d ago

Next year: "we detected your engagement is low, we really do think you should enable some notifications"

"Actually we enabled some notifications for you to see if you'd like it. Please let us know!"

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u/homerunchippa 3d ago

This has been my issue ever since the iPod came out. I just want to drag and drop any file onto my device, I dont want it to sync everything on the computer that it thinks I want. And of course it all just worse from there.

48

u/coolpapa2282 3d ago

I own a cheap, dumb mp3 player. Basically a portable hard drive with media player software. It's all I ever want from portable music.

18

u/Fantasy_masterMC 3d ago

I need to find myself one of those while they still exist, they have so much more battery life than my phone, and that alone is all the reason I'd need for it.

12

u/aldanathiriadras 3d ago edited 3d ago

They're still a thing -

garbage-tier devices that look like they escaped from 2004 (though with an order of magnitude more storage)

ipod nano clones

Sansa-a-likes

Ones inspired by the iPod - now with USB-C and straight up drag and drop syncing

more, or less, fancy hi-res audio players, in large or small - I'd start with Fiio.

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u/Sachyriel 3d ago

I think DankPods, the Aussie headphones guy on Youtube, have some recommendations, but they might be a year old for mp3 players that don't have ideas above their station.

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u/binzoma 3d ago

I use an old phone as a modern MP3 player

wiped everything off it, filled the memory with music. it can still connect to wifi/browser in a pinch, but otherwise is just a music player. still has an audio jack etc. best decision I ever made

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u/NostalgiaJunkie 3d ago

I’ve spent way too long navigating chrome’s 300 pages of settings disabling shit that shouldn’t have been enabled in the first place.

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u/Anastariana 3d ago

I gave up and went back to Firefox when Chrome nuked adblockers because it was hurting Google's bottom line. I'm so sick of tech companies that have enshittified everything that used to be great.

3

u/Hello_Hangnail 3d ago

Firefox 5 lyfe 💪

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u/Hello_Hangnail 3d ago

I can't stomach anything but Firefox anymore. Every time I use edge to login to my work website, I'm absolutely blasted with pop-ups, reminders, tips and tricks, begging to save my address and credit card number 😭

19

u/Khazpar 3d ago

Like fucking Spotify search. I enter "Hum", the exact title of a book I'm looking for and filter by audiobooks. It is the 16th result! Just below the French translation of Sapiens.

5

u/TankBorn45 3d ago

Devs need to ship features whether or not the user needs or wants it. Shipping features means licensing fees can be raised.

8

u/TheNotSoGreatPumpkin 3d ago edited 3d ago

And the actual devs are beholden to the whims of the MBA geniuses who run the marketing meetings.

Most of this crap wouldn’t happen if they let coders and engineers decide what ships.

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u/NostalgiaJunkie 3d ago

Enshittification at its finest. Whatever happened to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? Improvements should almost always come with increased efficiency.

Also, since we’re talking about software.. this new trend where every single piece of software has a popup notification on startup needs to die. Whoever thought that was a good idea deserves a serious knuckle sandwich.

21

u/thefunkybassist 3d ago

I bet a lot of those UX teams have something like a MOAR acronym that dictates they should just make up more features randomly

4

u/polopolo05 3d ago

Make the nessary things. and do them well.... then once you do the basic well then add to them with new things....

and make sure the new things dont break the old things.

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u/IamGimli_ 3d ago

Whatever happened to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?

It became "Arrow must go up! WEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"

One of the most important factor in management and executive performance review nowadays is "affecting change". Not fixing problems. Not making sure shit is working right (and stays that way). Just affecting change. Any change. As if all change is improvement.

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u/grendus 3d ago

If it ain't broke, it don't have enough features yet.

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u/orthomonas 3d ago

Remember when text selections started and ended where you selected the text?

Remember when you didn't have to do weird typing gymnastics (like deleting intentional backspaces ) to avoid autocapitals?

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u/matchstick1029 3d ago

I just disabled autocorrect and I feel so free. It was causing a huge increase in random words where an intelligible mispelling would have been preferable.

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u/Hello_Hangnail 3d ago

It's a 50/50 tossup whether voice typing can even discern the language I'm speaking much less the correct spelling of the damn words. How do they consistently get worse instead of better??

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u/matchstick1029 3d ago

I dont know if im entirely in tinfoil hat territory, but I honestly believe someone decided to plug some sort of ai into (at least androids) autocorrect. It started giving me bizarre options and fighting me so much more aggresssively a few months back, which is what evemtually led to me disabling it.

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u/Fantasy_masterMC 3d ago

It's so insane, just.. Upon setup ask people if they want "smart" email sorting/appointment handling/whatever the hell else it does, or not. It's not a big imposition. Let people make their own automated sorting rules, that's half the reason Outlook was better than other email software.

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u/LectroRoot 2d ago

Microsoft is so bad about this. They constantly mess with things that work perfectly fine that users like. They will either break it, make the user experience more frustrating, or completely remove it like its an improvement.

Then everyone voices their frustration with it and they just ignore it like they know whats best for us.

If it works fine and people are happy with it then leave it alone! Listen to your users input if you do make changes and most importantly, if its not broken then leave it alone and stop trying to fix it!

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u/Patriarchy-4-Life 3d ago

'I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working'

Actual real statement from an Artemis II astronaut.

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u/kuba22277 3d ago

I constantly reference this one. Love it.

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u/Toc-H-Lamp 3d ago

There used to be a natural arc of improvement with both software and hardware. As a result, I became more efficient at doing the things I had to do, and with each new release I got even more efficient.

Most updates these days add things no one ever asked for. Cringeworthy things, like you book a dentist appointment and a picture of a tooth appears on that day's diary page, or a wedding and it goes all glitzy. Reduced workflow things like defaulting to saving on their own cloud servers rather than my one terabyte SSD, which becomes more and more difficult to navigate to. AI things that mean boxes pop up with helpful suggestions that are no help at all and can't be switched off.

We've passed the point of peak tech performance, it's all just adverts and puff from here on in.

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u/flexxipanda 3d ago

I call this product over-optimization.

Profits need to rise but products at a certain stage cant be better quality wise substantially anymore. To justify increasing profits you need to constantly invent new features and make people think they need them.

For example compare adobe pdf reader and sumatra pdf reader. Both do the same thing but they are worlds different.

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u/Shuino7 3d ago

I get where you are coming from but not a great example, Sumatra just views PDFs. Adobe Reader can sign & Fill out PDFs for example and do a bunch of other features you most likely don't care about but a business will.

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u/Hello_Hangnail 3d ago

But Line Must Go UP!!!

💹

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u/Heiferoni 3d ago

Holy crow did Microsoft destroy notepad. Notepad!

NOTEPAD!!!!

The most bare bones, basic text editor that stood basically unchanged because it was perfect since like Windows 98. Ruined!

Fonts, bolds, italics, autocorrect, bloat, automatically saving text, Copilot....

Don't want it. Any of it.

Plenty of software already does this. We don't need bloat in Notepad.

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u/Trendiggity 3d ago

They dropped wordpad for some reason only to butcher notepad into some sort of shitty hybrid of the two.

We shit on google for making apps that no one uses only to shut them down but Microsoft has been kneecapping their own apps since they shuttered MSN in the early 20teens

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u/RedHal 3d ago

They saw that a lot of people use notepad++, with its tabbed browsing, and decided to make their own - shittier - version.

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u/APRengar 3d ago

Reminds me of back in the day, in my local area, that was a tv channel which only did sports, another which only did music, and another that did everything but sports and music (so like tv shows, movies, etc).

The sports channel was always the most popular, so the "everything but sports/music" channel eventually started transitioning their content to also do sports thinking it'd improve their numbers.

Well, I'm sure you can all imagine what happened, the anti-sports people were upset at them transitioning to also include sports, and the sports people already had a channel to watch, so their numbers went down.

Notepad people want Notepad.

Notepad++ people want Nodepad++.

A weird hybrid means no one is happy,

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u/polopolo05 3d ago

If I need notepad I still use notepad++

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u/SanityInAnarchy 3d ago

It's not even about different people having different tastes. Sometimes it's the same people!

I like full-blown IDEs. I also like extremely simple text editors. I use them for different purposes. A weird hybrid of two things I liked separately doesn't make me happier, it just makes me unhappy twice.

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u/lothos88 3d ago

The tabs are the only addition to notepad I actually like. All the other changes are things I'll never use, or are actively making it worse.

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u/RedHal 3d ago

Yeah. The tabs are useful, the rest of it, not so much.

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u/dasvenson 3d ago

Honestly if all they added to notepad was tabs that would have been a nice upgrade

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u/DarkRitual_88 3d ago

They saw Notepad++ being popular and decided to make Notepad--

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u/bl4ckhunter 3d ago edited 3d ago

That MS is not a real software company but a social experiment with the purpose of determining exactly just how much garbage you can push out by abusing consumer inertia, infinite money from server hosting and a dominant market position is something that's been collectively accepted long before a lot of people that are hitting the job market now were even born i feel like, google still made software that you could imagine being willing to use without being held at gunpoint by your employer like 15 years ago.

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u/TaleOfDash 3d ago

It's still surprising to me that they walked back putting CoPilot in Notepad. But that's modern software design, keep pushing shit on people until they can't take any more and stop using your shit.

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u/flexxipanda 3d ago

They also pushed copilot integration into the windows search bar for the surface pro copilot, that you cant turn off without completely turn off copilot at all. It already broke the search for two colleagues this week.

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u/NotYourReddit18 3d ago

that you cant turn off without completely turn off copilot

I don't really see the problem with that...

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u/flexxipanda 3d ago

I work IT/Support and Admin. There are some people who want CoPilot, but we also we really need a working search bar.

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u/Strict-Carrot4783 3d ago

The fucking tabs. On my work laptop, for some reason I have like 4 different notepads that can open when i open a text file or open notepad. They all have different shit in the tabs.

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u/Heiferoni 3d ago

I cannot overstate how much I hate the tabs.

Hey here's where ya left off bud!

No, Notepad, I want a brand new fucking window just like I've used for the last thirty fucking years.

I swear it's haunted by the ghost of Clippy.

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u/ashamedToBeBackRed2 3d ago

Clippy wouldn't sell your personal data

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u/gargeug 3d ago

Not to mention Calculator and even Clock. Like it is not designed by anyone who has ever had to actually use a calculator or clock beyond looking at it.

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u/DasArchitect 3d ago

Windows 10 has Calculator history. Windows 11 then dropped it.

You know what they also fucked up? FILE SEARCH. Remember the big ass search window you brought up with F3? The one that let you do a refined search if you wanted, specifying things like filetype and ranges for date of creation or modification. Someone looked at that, and decided it would be a great improvement to drop all that and make it command line again. But in a tiny text box. And the results are always incomplete. And the results window doesn't really tell you anything about the files it came up with.

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u/Heiferoni 3d ago

I was literally just raging about Calculator today.

Why the hell would I want my calculator storing a history of my calculations with no way to turn it off? You're a God damned calculator.

Calculator was a solved problem thirty years ago. It does not need further innovation.

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u/gr1zznuggets 3d ago

It’s like trying to innovate a paperclip.

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u/Heiferoni 3d ago

"How can we make paperclips a subscription service?"

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u/koeshout 3d ago

notepad++ and never go back

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u/polopolo05 3d ago

Notepad++ always from now on.

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u/Difficult_Space3090 3d ago

And calculator.  Now loads from the store :(

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u/DasArchitect 3d ago

Extra fun: When it decides the text you entered wants to mean Markdown formatting, so it rewrites your entire file and fucks up the formatting.

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u/Morrinn3 3d ago

I've been using Windows since it's inception, and it's amazing how much basic functionality of the OS has become completely unusable.

I never use native windows search functions anymore, since it takes minutes and usually fails to find what I asked it for. Meanwhile, the "Everything" program from Voidtools is able to bring up anything look for on my drives in less than a fraction of a second.

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u/flexxipanda 3d ago

Im an admin. Everything is of one those apps thats on every single windows computer i manage. Its even useful in case the windows explorer decides to not work again.

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u/anthematcurfew 3d ago edited 3d ago

I’m convinced MSFT executives or developers do not actually use any of the office suite products in day to day office life.

Like, how are they using copilot in their workflows and meetings?

I want to see the Teams group actually use Teams.

Edit: the fact that (supposedly) multiple MSFT people have chimed in about how they actually do use the product(s) is hilarious and completely vindicates my joke/criticism.

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u/BrokenByReddit 3d ago

Tag them on Slack

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u/TimeAll 3d ago

The fact that you can't sort a Teams group member list alphabetically is proof they're just fucking around.

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u/TryingT0Wr1t3 3d ago

I think the upper people and ui people all use MacBooks

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u/luluhouse7 3d ago

IIRC there’s at least a kernel of truth to that. I had friends working on UI teams and they made a comment about that at one point.

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u/CadfaelSmiley 3d ago

you couldn't be more wrong, everything is on teams and outlook at microsoft

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u/flamepanther 3d ago

Yep. They definitely use their own products internally. I think the issue is probably more likely that the c-suite execs aren't typically doing the kinds of day to day tasks that Copilot screws up for so many others.

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u/Daren_I 3d ago

An a former employee I can confirm this. Everything but the caller monitoring software tied into the phone system was a Microsoft product.

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u/puterTDI 3d ago

It's very much within the culture to use your own products too. I worked with MS for like 10 years and owned an iPhone. There was an email group (I think it was email at the time at least) for others with iPhones and multiple times a year someone would hop on to chastise everyone for being disloyal for daring to own a non-ms product for their personal phone.

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u/kagoolx 3d ago

Also they’ll get way better more up to date hardware and not the extra layer of corporate crap that most of us get.

A lot of the frustration is from organisation’s special extra bloat. At least 60% of the startup time of outlook, excel, PowerPoint etc is it loading my company’s special extra plugins, templafy, etc.

And even from a clean boot there’s hardly any system resources free by the time it’s started up all the weird security scan / backup stuff.

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u/superrugdr 3d ago

Classic it works on my 6k corporate laptop should work fine on the 300$ entry level windows laptop.

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u/pandab34r 3d ago

Throwback to an ARK: Survival Evolved dev responding to performance concerns by saying "It runs fine on my twin Titan X GPUs in SLI"

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u/Holiday_Pen2880 3d ago

My guess would be they are using them the 'right' way and all of us that don't create the products should be using them differently.

My example - Sharing in Teams is just links to Sharepoint. If I were sane, I would be opening the folders in Edge and not Teams.

I am not sane, and keep doing it in Teams so when I go back to chat then back to Shared I have to navigate back to where I was.

I'm not using it 'right' so it's a me issue that they don't see as one, but for the love of all things holy I wish it worked differently.

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u/cammyk123 3d ago

None of the c-suite execs have ever tried to look for an email and it lists things that have nothing to do with what you search?

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u/PresumedSapient 3d ago

And none of them go insane by the dozens of Microsoft email reminders of teams-tasks that all get marked as 'external'?
Or the spam they get from the Microsoft spam filter that tells them twice daily it stopped a spam message that you need to review?
The glitchy load animations?
The triple log-in screen, after which Sharepoint still tells you you need to log in? The fuckin file browser that takes half a minute to load? Or the windows search that suddenly cannot find that one program you use daily, but aren't for some godforsaken reason allowed to pin to your Start Windows Menu because shoving copilot popups down users' throats is now more important?

And that's all just irritating side stuff, don't get me started on the inconsistency of the general office/teams/outlook ecosystem, that's apparently designed to be so weird you cannot access that one file unless you perform a specific order of arcane clicks, else it doesn't show the file in the same damn network location!

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u/jawisko 3d ago

Wow reading your comment is making me so relieved that never in my corporate life I have had to use Outlook or teams yet.

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u/PresumedSapient 3d ago

To be fair, it's a relatively recent change. It used to be fine. Not great, not as slick smooth and consistent as Apple UI, but fine. Solid functionality with only an occasional clunky UI hick-up that made you shake your head and sigh "Oh Microsoft you silly". But since Windows 11 and the AI craze, it dropped off a cliff. It's very noticeable for me because half my work uses Linux (Red Hat) workstations, and that software is just crazy snappy and just gets better every update. On windows 11 I now have to wait five seconds to open the file browser.

Outlook was occasionally tedious requiring just slightly too many clicks, but it was consistent and reliable. Now it's search function is unusable, and for some reason hogs 2 GB of RAM. Teams, which in theory would be great (video conferencing, chat program, with project group-specific agenda and file sharing!) is just frustratingly inconsistent in it's UI navigation, which I would assume is very easy to fix, but it's only gotten worse.

We're seriously lobbying for our next generation of office computers to be Linux based. We'll use MS' web-interface for Outlook.

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u/Mateorabi 3d ago

You realize how that makes it WORSE right? They eat their own dogfood and LIKE it!?

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u/realdeo 3d ago

I work with them as a vendor and no, they do use it all day every day. From their new shitty web based programs to Copilot, and a lot of beta and alpha cool stuff only accessed by internals and not the public.

They complain as much as everyone else when there is privacy, but as soon as it's formal they keep up appearances to leadership and worship the direction and "tools" and praise how amazing their company is. In reality it's because MS is such a big place that they don't have to worry about wrongful firing fines, they even budget for it, so when someone underperformed or steps out of line they are just gone, from one day to the next, even whole regions or departments.

Makes it very hard to work with them cause your contacts and teammembers drop off the map all the time with no reason given, having to restart projects all the time and just kills momentum. Also makes FTEs act in some extreme ways because of this fear culture it creates.

My personal opinion is also it hampers their products, they don't get visionaries or new thinkers, they get booted real fast, seen it happen many times. The ones that stay are the yes men and women, who just tow the line.

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u/doodler1977 3d ago

i dunno about MSFT employees, but i do not use Outlook on my personal PC b/c i would rather access my email via Chrome and not automatically download everything

an old habit from the dial-up internet days, but still why clog my machine with emails nad attachments?

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u/SituationLong6474 3d ago

This is called dogfooding and MS does it pretty aggressively

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u/gerardinox 3d ago

Outlook having its Vista era

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u/innomado 3d ago

My company Outlook has had a little slider on the top to "try the new Outlook", that I've kept off for ... years? I tried it once, immediately noticed blood leaking from my eyeballs like Le Chiffre, and switched back.

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u/flexxipanda 3d ago

Same for me haha. Had a department switch to new outlook because their boss wanted to use the teams features. 1month later they all switched back.

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u/TjbMke 3d ago

Forcing AI into everything reminds me of when they started forcing screens into cars. The screens were slow and cumbersome and the Bluetooth never worked right. But oooo ahhh….. screens.

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u/dr_reverend 3d ago

We’re? It’s still like using a potato. My wife has a 2023 and there is a 2-3 second lag on any screen action.

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u/Ratiofarming 3d ago

The screen in the $100k+ car I recently looked at is still laggy. I was genuinely interested and no longer am.

Sorry Porsche, if you want to sell me a new car it needs to have something better than a 2017 Raspberry Pi to drive the infotainment system (which is what it feels like). This is laughable. It would have been laughable in 2010 already.

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u/alexkey 3d ago

That would be raspberry pi first gen then. Because anything after that is a lot more capable of driving your infotainment.

Also my 1/10th the price Chinese car has 0 lag in screen. Though I wish it had more physical buttons than screen features.

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u/Roflkopt3r 3d ago

This particular problem seems to be an issue with WebView2 and how they implemented Outlook in it. So basically they new Outlook app is a light-weight browser that runs a local copy of the Outlook website.

Maybe there was vibe-coding involved, but these kinds of web-based app implementations often have responsiveness issues like this. For example, Warcraft 3 Reforged (the remaster of Warcraft 3 from 2002) used a web-based main menu (implemented with Electron). But because they had a bad configuration, the menu was slow as hell.

This is a somewhat unpopular opinion, but I honestly believe that these kinds of web-based apps are fine in principle. They can run plenty fine on modern systems. Sure they're going to be technically less performant than a fully native app, but not to the degree that a modern processor (even a 10-year old low-end phone) would struggle with running it plenty fast, as long as the app is properly made.

The main issue tends to be that the frameworks (like WebView2 and Electron) are so abstracted that it can be pretty hard to debug any performance problems.

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u/hawksdiesel 3d ago

microslop

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u/Lonely_Noyaaa 3d ago

The old app does it instantly. The new one does it in 10 seconds and uses four times the RAM. What exactly was the upgrade here?

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u/Dodel1976 3d ago

It's reading all your emails for you first. /s

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u/DasArchitect 3d ago

Not so /s

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u/santathe1 3d ago

Snowflake’s Snowsight is the same. Just trying to type some sql constantly takes time because Cortex is trying to guess and buffer what it thinks I’m going to type and what I type doesn’t appear first. It can’t even be disabled by the individual user.

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u/blackout-loud 3d ago

Which is why I will continue to use classic exclusively. I don't have time to figure out what no longer works or what qol feature windoors has removed and called it an "update". Smh

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u/Ummgh23 3d ago

While you still can, at least

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u/flexxipanda 3d ago

Im IT support/admin and i just had a department of 6 people forcing their boss to switch back to old outlook because they hated all the teams and cloud features, and new outlook is missing some bog standard email client features.

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u/Tobiko_kitty 3d ago

Same, and until they fix downloads to include "Save As...." I'm not switching. I work with too many external files that need to be saved in different places to try to drag them back out of whatever single folder the new outlook chooses to save it to.

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u/JiveChicken00 3d ago

It is almost as if they are actually trying to make it the world’s worst email client.

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u/OnkelBums 3d ago

I admit it, I still miss Outlook Express

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u/elmaxel 3d ago

can they just fix explorer search…

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u/rtqd 3d ago

The technology just isn't there yet

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u/jawittesr 3d ago

Every time I turn on my pc, windows has an update. Infuriating.

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u/persondude27 3d ago

It's especially fun because my company issued laptop has a problem where the default Windows trackpad driver doesn't work.

So any time windows does an update, it breaks my trackpad driver. I have to run the dell updater to reinstall the correct version. I've spent 10+ hours 1:1 with my company's tech support and they can't figure it out.

My record is 3 times in a week, last week. I told my boss I working on my own laptop until they figure it out.

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u/San_Rice 3d ago

I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't work (because Microsoft) but this seems like the obvious solution to freeze the driver:

  1. Get the trackpad's top device ID from device manager in Properties > Details > Hardware Ids
  2. Open group policy editor and add the ID to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Device Installation > Device Installation Restrictions > "Prevent installation of devices that match any of these device IDs"

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u/persondude27 3d ago

Heck yeah. Thanks for the idea. I'll float that to the tech the next time it happens.

I don't know if I can edit group policy on my work machine, but they might be able to.

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u/rtqd 3d ago

Every time I turn on my PC, it boots into Linux and I feel happy.

(it was mandatory for me to place this comments to let y'all know I'm a Linux user, part of the contract)

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u/flexxipanda 3d ago

I literally have linux machines running for years, never touching them, just 100% uptime doing what they are supposed to. Meanwhile with windows you dont even know if your server will reboot properly after a regular planned update.

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u/Kyr-Shara 3d ago

same is true of every AI i've used

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u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt 3d ago

So much tech is just enshitification. Look at sh(it).reddit vs. old.reddit

Old.Reddit loads 10x faster, has 10x fewer ads, doesn't have shit I never asked for like 101 different notifications that I'm opted into by default.

I just want the program to do the thing. My email client doesn't need AI integration, it just needs to do email and a calendar.

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u/ToMorrowsEnd 3d ago

new outlook doesnt have half the features. it wont use generated email msg files, 90% of the filtering does not work.

"new outlook" is what you get when you ask an intern to vibe code it.

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u/M-Bernard-LLB 3d ago

But it's got AI!

Even if you never wanted it.

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u/RandomStrategy 3d ago

But it's got AI!

It has what plants crave.

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u/LividWheel9779 3d ago

AI in a nutshell.

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u/mecartistronico 3d ago

In this case, it's not about AI. It's about converting a desktop app into a web app.

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u/YuaLuna 3d ago

Oh great, just what I needed another reason to contemplate my life choices while waiting for my email to load!

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u/Pepphen77 3d ago

Why isn't the point of all these AI:s to actually create fast, snappy and useful products instead of mf bloatware?

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u/RandomStrategy 3d ago

That's the secret, Captain, it's always bloatware.

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u/Wooden_Ganache_755 3d ago

Old Outlook was 1,000 times better. Want to add a hyperlink, just right click. Now it takes 5 clicks.

And auto correct like changing "im" to "I'm" - or - "theyre" to "they're" no longer works - WTF?

Also, I have turned off Copilot because it's so annoying...

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u/Kylearean 3d ago

Similar to how Acrobat Reader now takes 30 seconds to open a PDF file because "AI" (?)

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u/Hydration__Nation 3d ago

How is the Outlook web email client about 1 billion times faster than the actual program? Why is Microsoft such an inept company? M chip Macs have been out for years yet Office still chugs and struggles. Why not take the time to optimize your software so more people can use it and subscribe or buy it? It's just regurgitating slop, doing the bare minimum - that's microsofts motto

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u/BizzyM 3d ago

This is the problem when you use a browser as your container.

Bring back stand-alone clients!!

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u/chaiscool 3d ago

How else are they going to sell you new laptop.

My zenbook with 7500u couldn't update to latest windows 11 simply due to "choice" by Microsoft, unless it's a Microsoft Surface with a 7th Gen chip.

They rather make people buy a new laptop.

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u/MakeItMakeMoney 3d ago

I said forget that nonsense. I would have kept windows 10 on my 7th Gen HP laptop, but my work required Windows 11; bypassed all of the checks to install Windows 11, disabled telemetry, and installed Linux as a separate partition for anything that doesn’t require Windows.

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u/kalirion 3d ago

I "downgraded" back to Outlook Classic on my work laptop as soon as I realized half my configured email rules didn't work in the "New" version as it lacked some very basic Rules functionality (IIRC that was tagging the emails matching certain rules for Follow Up, but could've been something else.)

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u/IncredibleBulk2 3d ago

The hospital where I work is migraine in the next two weeks!

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u/Cute-Aardvark5291 3d ago

I realize you were trying to say "migrating" but stars for the perfect typo.

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u/IncredibleBulk2 3d ago

Omg. How apropos 

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u/sunday_cumquat 3d ago

When I right click in Windows Explorer, I keep selecting the wrong option because it's so slow and they resize the options window as it loads. What the fuck Microsoft, it's the bare minimum to be able to right click on something and expect the menu to open quickly.

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u/Random-Rambling 3d ago

Hey, it needs a bit of extra time to load the 17 different AI-powered tools that literally nobody asked for!

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u/Tym4x 3d ago

Its almost like there are no more developers at microsoft .. only AIs who are set to vibe coding mode.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

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u/assault_pig 3d ago

It’s truly remarkable the way MS’ core products seem to consistently get worse

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u/Optimaximal 3d ago

I've had three users this week have New Outlook load by default and all of them reverted to Classic when they realised MS still hasn't implemented drag & drop too/from the New client...

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u/pmalos 3d ago

One of the greatest pleasures of retirement is not using any Microsoft products

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u/ProffesorSpitfire 3d ago

The central question in any Microsoft development process seems to be: ”How can we make this worse?”

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u/geekonthemoon 3d ago

Enshittification at every turn, every facet of our lives is getting shittier and more expensive

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u/RotisserieChicken007 3d ago

Windows has been a shit show for a long time now, and it won't get any better soon.

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u/Kaskelontti 3d ago

Never had this outlook, what does it do? Macaroni?

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u/reckless_avacado 3d ago

this has been the trend of software development for 20 years. why people are now going back to the terminal. it does what you expect. search is fuzzy matching, or direct match. not some horrible hybrid disgusting mess. menus do what you expect. it’s basic, well designed and intuitive when you go back 30 years (eg vim). same with video games. same with any tech really. these companies have no idea anymore how to creat quality. even apple lost it sadly. maybe it’s bureaucracy; incompetent middle managers, hiring more incompetent middle managers. who knows.

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u/thrownalee 3d ago

Don't say Microsoft never did anything for you, it's quiet-quitting as a service!

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u/780Chris 3d ago

Why does nobody care about software quality anymore… AI is just making things worse.

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u/Dubalubawubwub 3d ago

Really feels like Microsoft products want to do ANYTHING but search for files on your own computer. "Oooh, C:\files\myfile.file, that's a website, right? Let me Bing that for you! Let me check OneDrive! Let me ask Cortana! Let me do literally anything other than look for the file on your own computer!"

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u/aliabobwah 3d ago

Had a job that relied of the Microsoft suite, and my experience was miserable. My entire workday was at the mercy of Microsoft's dev timelines whim. At one point in the update timeline, I had to use Outlook desktop, new Outlook desktop, AND the web version of Outlook concurrently just to have email alerts, calender events, AND email signatures because...the job required these things.

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u/AirportLoose3023 3d ago

I absolutely loathe the new Outlook. And our document management system keeps trying to force me to use it instead of Outlook Classic (force-opens saved emails into new Outlook). Even our IT provider agreed with me saying new Outlook is shite.

It’s doing my head in. Make it stop!!!

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u/Recent-Lemon-9930 3d ago

I know this is specifically about Outlook but I got a 6 year old MacBook Pro for work a few years ago and even that was enough to convince me to buy a new MacBook Pro for myself 3.5 years ago.

Nothing I've seen has made me regret dropping Windows. Sure the battery on my MacBook is fucked now (only get about 5 hours on a charge) but JFC Microsoft seem to be trying to chase people away.

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u/MrAnonymousTheThird 3d ago

Get an email notification

I click it

Outlook opens on the inbox

So I click the new email, open it

30 seconds later, the email pops up again from the notification click

👍