Yes. That’s what’s coming. One Outlook is a PWA. It is Outlook.com dressed in a wrapper. Outlook.com is not good as a professional grade email tool. My org is too cheap to purchase outlook licenses. It’s horrendous trying to manage all of the email that I get with a website.
No. They are going to charge the same amount for a suite of garbage web apps. And be happy they don’t raise prices. And they just might.
Yes, it has been the plan for at least 20 years or more. Nothing is new. Condition the masses with small “bits” (incremental changes) along the way (over time so they don’t notice or feel the change), get use to it…new generation of users (usually younger) who don’t have a clue about the process comes along and usually likes it because they don’t know anything of what was before and see it as “new and exciting”…then eventually the plan over time is executed.
How? Have you used Teams at all? It’s a PWA from Microsoft. It’s not at all great. It’s just a Microsoft website bundled into a container using Electron. And you think Microsoft will give Apple a run for their money because they are building a fleet of containerized websites that don’t work like a native app or have an excellent experience for the user on their given platform? Outlook.com is fine if you’re doing really basic things in your inbox, but beyond that it’s a website and it feels like one. It will feel like one inside a container, PWAs always do. It will be resource hungry and won’t take advantage of built in OS features that some end users really need. Image your employee who needs assistive functions baked in to windows and macOS comes to you and tells you that they won’t work with Teams. Turns out this happens sometimes with PWAs. Apple can be criticized for many things, but they are fairly exacting when it comes to the user experience of their native software apps and macOS. Microsoft can’t make the same claim while making lazy web apps for the desktop and simultaneously charging the same subscriptions for it.
It’s largely the same thing. I’ve heard it’s going to be a windows specific container framework of some kind. It’s still going to be a website in a self contained box. Doesn’t matter what wrapper they use it won’t be as good as a well developed native app and I’ve yet to see a PWA with full feature parity with a native client.
I have a small business and I pay for fully licensed subscriptions for all my employees which aren’t many. It’s expensive. I work also for one of the largest and most wasteful organizations on the planet. They use Outlook.com because they don’t have to pay for the license, keep an app updated, or have IT manage email very often. But I am a power user for Outlook myself. There is much the web version can’t do and it never works in a way that feels instant. Click compose new message or type N on your keyboard in outlook.com and see if there isn’t a slight delay opening a new panel to compose an email; never have that delay on a desktop.
It's not. Electron is just a wrapper around a website. React Native uses each platform's built-in UI elements.
The internals will be a website. It’s already been built. They might use some native gui elements with React Native, but React Native isn’t a native app. It doesn’t support all native APIs, it’s still largely java script driven, it’s still heavily website driven and lacks support for third party library plugins. React Native my be better than Electron, but only just so.
I wish, but I’m not so sure.
I agree with you to an extent. I don’t think there is going to an uproar over teams. It’s not like Skype was exactly a masterpiece. And most of the people using Outlook aren’t even aware enough to know that they are even in a progressive web app or what one is. But Office has its uses for professionals in the finance and data analysis spheres. Those people don’t care about the IT execs. If Excel goes the same way as Teams then you’ll have a whole bunch of people just bringing a cheap laptop with used copies of older versions of excel and they won’t care what the IT department wants or what the standards are via MS.
I have taken a look and haven't seen much more about it. But go back and look at articles and forum posts about the move to a new Outlook client based on React and Outlook.com from the original announcement. I think what happened and this is pure speculation, is that Microsoft made the announcement and then the backlash hit from comments sections and from forums like this one.
We have been moving everyone to the New Outlook view and have not had anyone have to re-setup their mailboxes. What type of mail are you using? (IMAP, O365, Exchange?)
Unless you need Exchange. Thunderbird makes the best client in my opinion. It's fast, reliable and way more customizable than Apple Mail. Although it's a bit more work to setup initially. Plus not as many services will sync calendar and contacts with it.
