Dear @satyanadella: Are You Embarrassed by Outlook Mac?
Outlook Mac is a piece of crap. Why does Microsoft keep pretending to support the product?
You should be, but I doubt you even know how bad it is. You most likely use Windows yourself. I imagine that it’s severely career-limiting to be the putz who works on Macintosh stuff in The Windows Company, particularly since Apple exceeded expectations and is now worth 50% more than Microsoft, rather than 80% less, and no longer needs big brother to help validate it.
I hope you have a secret project to replace your standard email client for the Macintosh. Every two weeks, I get an update to my Microsoft Office Suite for Macintosh and every week, nothing really changes about Outlook Mac. I’ve been getting those updates for at least three years, a reasonable timeframe in which to expect a company to realize that it has a problem product and fix it.
Last major update? “Find and fix accessibility issues while composing messages or invitations by using the Accessibility Checker”! Meanwhile, Outlook Mac crashes or becomes unusable, can’t format phone numbers or look up addresses online, can’t manage time zones, doesn’t integrate well with Apple or Gmail calendars or even allow you to add photos to an email.
It’s embarrassing for a major, iconic software company to put such a piece of crap into the market. If you really don’t care about the product, you should admit it (publicly, please), schedule the end of its life, and give your Macintosh users a feasible path forward to read email processed by the Exchange server, something that is now much easier to do since you redeveloped Exchange to be a cloud service provided as part of Office 365 — on the internet!
(It’s another blog post, but Tim Cook should probably be even more embarrassed by Apple Mail. But at least you can pretend that that client is a better way to read email on a Macintosh than Outlook Mac, since Apple Mail is made by Apple for their native platform!)
What is wrong with Outlook that makes it a piece of crap? Let’s see — it just crashed again! I know this because I got this message from CleanMyMac, which keeps track.
This crash happens on all of my computers (I have four Macintoshes) pretty regularly. It has crashed enough that I’ve almost figured out why, but I keep wondering: Why do I, a mere user, have to figure out why the mighty Microsoft’s software doesn’t work?
Is Microsoft not paying attention to the crash reports it asks to submit every time it crashes? I have submitted this crash report so many times, I feel like I must have affected the statistics enough to make someone at Microsoft notice. (Can you see that I unchecked the option to restart Microsoft Outlook? I did that so it wouldn’t restart and present the same problem and crash again.)
This is just one problem that I have that has not been repaired in multiple updates to Outlook Mac. Another is the “feature” that Outlook Mac “automatically” makes some of my calendar appointments use what is called UTC (short for Universal Time Coordinated); this used to be known as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), aka the time zone for London, where time zones were apparent invented. For some reason, Microsoft decided to make UTC/GMT the “default” time zone and now forces appointments to appear in that time zone, but only sometimes. From where I live in the Pacific time zone (PST/PDT depending on the time of year), that is 8 hours later. So any appointment in my calendar that is later than 4pm actually shows up in my calendar a day later in a different time zone. I can’t even begin to unravel what the product manager was thinking, but this has resulted in significant confusion and angst among Outlook Mac users, like in this thread at Macrumors which has 25 posts over 10 months on an issue that has not been resolved even though the software has been updated regularly during that time.
I could do on and on. Why can’t Outlook Mac recognize a phone number in Contact and format it correctly, the way Contacts on an iPhone does easily? Why does Outlook Mac refuse to acknowledge my default email address in creating a new message? Why? Why? Why?
An honest company that really cares about its customers would not pretend to serve a set of customers who will never get a satisfactory product. So, Satya Nadella, I know that you have a lot on your plate, but would you please just admit that you will NEVER make Outlook Mac into a first class product and help us migrate to something that will work for us?