Yes, I am biased. I used to be in the PIM business many years with a product called DayMaker. But I think I am past that now. And while Outlook may be a reasonable email client, in my view the contact/calendar/task features, or their implementation, *really* suck.
It seems to me that outlook is weak compared to all the online competitors for each category, from mail, to calendar, to contact, to tasks. It is true that nothing is really doing a good job of integrating all of that yet, but Outlook doesn't do a good job of it either.
Outlook's hold is purely that companies have standardized on exchange, and to the extent that people are uncomfortable with their data in the cloud, an exchange server has really been the only choice.
This really isn't an analysis, just a bit of a rant. I am curious what others think.
Monday, February 18, 2008
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13 comments:
It isn't just that Outlook (or, as my husband calls it - Outhouse) sucks, it's that it is the poster child of bad/poor usability. Outlook remains one of the many reasons I ran away screaming from Windows 3 years ago, and have been a happy Mac user ever since.
http://www.xobni.com/ may help.
I'm not affiliated with them and I haven't tried it. Still, looks promising.
Lori, Hank - just out of curiosity, what's the last version of Outlook you've used? Outlook 2003 was, for me, a big step forward in the tasks space and Outlook 2007 is even better overall.
Now, admittedly, the iCal implementation sucks (it opens events as "new calendars" instead of on your own), but otherwise I find things pretty nice. Tasks and calendar items sync to my blackberry and WinMo device. You can flag e-mail and calendar items with a "follow up by..." flag and assign them a category, and have search folders that drive that.
Xobni is a nice plugin but doesn't fundamentally change the task, contact, or calendar space.
Even today as I've left the corporate world and entered the startup world, I run my own Exchange (as I have for the past 3 years) because I like having it in the cloud, but in a cloud I control :) (Outlook Web Access - especially the Exchange 2007 version - is a very good web client by the way).
tim, I used all versions of Outlook up to and including 2003. Continuous frustration in dealing with multiple email accounts, which included IMAP, was one of the many issues. The monolithic PST/OST files (horrible for incremental backups), and inability to find/remove duplicates were some of the others.
As for 2007, my only experience is with the one-and-only copy in our office, belonging to the office manager. It continuously downloads multiple, partial, unreadable copies of emails from the IMAP server. It's a nightmare.
gabe, xobni looks interesting. I'll have to point some of my Outlook-using colleagues at it.
Have to agree that all versions of Outlook suck to some degree. The calendar, contacts, journal, etc in 2003 blow so hard, sometimes I feel like I am back in Amsterdam.
Outlook 2007 was a step in the right direction. Calendar/Contact sharing still have a ways to go before I can assuredly state that Outlook is not mostly suck.
Reciprocally, is there an email client aside from Outlook that sucks less? Thunderbird's feature set does not come close to Outlook, but I have not played with it enough to determine if the Calendar/Contact functionality is any better. At work I use Outlook 2007 because I run an Exchange environment, and at home, I use Outlook 2003 because I have not found anything better.
Hi guys if anyone is interested in a Xobni invite I have two left. (I'm not affiliated with them I just like trying out new tools)
I have to agree with Tim however, it doesn't ease the pain of the Outlook task, contact, or calendar but it does organize email threads well and has a nifty stay in touch feature.
Great to meet you Hank! I was just suffering from my daily "I hate Outlook" blues when I said, I can't be alone. I googled on "outlook sucks", just knowing there had to be others out there. Yes, I've found a hord of new like minded friends.
But wow!, I never expected to run into the author of my first favorite PIM, DayMaker. When I got my Powerbook 140 back in 1991 I remember taking a chance and buying a somewhat unknown product called DayMaker. I probably read a review in MacWorld. I loved that program! To this day, I don't think my life was ever to cleanly run. Back then there were no PDAs and I probably accessed email on a VT100 terminal emulation window. So there was nothing to sync to, DayMaker was the one and only tool I used to organize myself.
Since then the world's gotten more complex. I got a Newton and probably had to sync with that. Then my company switched to Exchange and I probably switched out the Powerbook 140 for a 386sx 33Mhz PC laptop with Windows 3.11 Workgroup. Oh my god. Things really started to suck then.
The sad part is that over 15 years later, Microsoft can still getting away with shipping this piece of junk called Outlook 2003 (I'm not exposed to 2007 yet) and corporate America, hell corporate the world, is held back this piece of crap. I cannot believe that this appears to be a single threaded app in 2008. Give me a break.
Thanks for DayMaker ... and thanks for the chance to rant on Outlook.
I too loved Daymaker and have missed it since its demise even though I hung on to it for a long time.
How about getting it going again?
Out of pure frustration I just ran a google search "why does outlook office 2003 suck so bad?" and oila! up came up this site (along with others directly on point!). WOW I guess I shouldn't be surprised that other people out there are thinking the same thing. Here's a relatively minor point -- but why is there no f-ing way to display the outlook calendar so you can actually see the same amount of weekend events as weekday events (without them being all scrunched up like the weekends don't count). I hate outlook. All the various views (month; week; workweek; day) just all simply suck. I come from iCal and Palm and Outlook's Calendar is so not visually pleasing or user friendly - so of course I'm forced to use it in my business. If anyone has any thoughts on how to make Outlook more visually appealing (for a start) - please let me know.
I'm with you, Hank. I have Outlook 2007 (and have been using OL for 10 years previously) and I'll dump it as soon as I can find a replacement. It's not the fancy stuff not working that irritates me, it's the basics that it can't manage. Every month or two, with updates, it just makes up new rules for creating new folders and hiding my mail (from both IMAP and POP) in new places. Today it decided to quit showing me my current "sent" mail in the folder where it's always placed it before - in fact, it's nowhere to be found in any folder.
Basically, OL is the poster-child for the "Tower-of-Babel" programming movement. You know, the one wherein layer upon layer of crap is heaped upon previous layers of crap and "re-factoring" is a taboo word. Eventually, no mortal knows what's going on, everyone quits caring, and they go into "reactive mode" where only the most popular complaints are responded to with yet more patches. Actually, MS is home-base for this movement and OL is just their lead-product to see how much of it they can get away with.
Screaming mad (again) here.
OUTLOOK F-ING SUCKS!
I have spent two days trying to bring back in my wife's email. I used the Outlook PST Backup tool to the letter. All I can get is a folder with some deleted items in it. The scanpst.exe shows 77 folders, 850 emails, a <500MB files size. Nothing works, no one has a fix, it's just a big PIECE OF SH*T. Why can't I just DRAG my email folder to a safe place, then dump it back in? What is this backup/import/open/ startover still doesn't work forever crap? This is XP PRO. And that PST Backup tool? Can only be installed for ONE user? I made the mistake of thinking I could use the initial Administrator account to try the first email backup...then discovered it DISAPPEARS when you create other user accounts...no worries, it can be accessed in SAfe Mode...BUT I cannot UNINSTALL the PST Backup app in Safe Mode. So now, I have a one-user-only app in an account I can't use, NOR DELETE, nor uninstall from. I had to re-install WinXP from a blank disk again.
MICROSOFT, this is the kind of SH*T that will drive me to Apple!!!! YOU SUCK!!!
I will keep xp until it is taken away. I hope to never give another penny to MS. I need something better than Outlook. It is so slow and locks up every few minutes. I only need a good email program and don't have to syn or use a calander, wht will work fo just email. that C_A_D to shut the damn thin off if getting old. Will Thunderbird work well for just email.
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