F*&@#$^% Microsoft

Very few people understand the complexities of building software to begin with. Fewer still understand what it takes to build complex software that has evolved for 10, 20, or more years that serves millions of customers worldwide.

The test matrix for something like Outlook is unreal. Achieving 100% test coverage is unbelievably difficult to achieve for any sophisticated product. Attempting to apply that to a non-deterministic number of possible customer configurations isn't even remotely achievable.

I've got piles of PCs, Macs, tablets, phones, music gear, TVs, streaming devices, cable boxes, etc. - they have all crashed, hung, failed requiring a reboot, etc..

The day someone builds some non-trivial commercial software that is 100% stable and bug-free will be something to behold. I can't think of a single product on the market that has ever met that criteria.
 
hippietim said:
Very few people understand the complexities of building software to begin with. Fewer still understand what it takes to build complex software that has evolved for 10, 20, or more years that serves millions of customers worldwide.
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True, BUT: the word "serves" implies that software is there for the user, not the other way round. Sooner or later, with all proprietary software, this is in conflict with business goals.

Case in point: IIUC, Cliff could have made progress if, at least, his emails weren't locked in to Outlook, but instead stored in a free format --- but this conflicts directly with MicroSoft's interests.

The first step on the way out: avoid vendor lock-in at (virtually) all costs --- at the very least by controlling your own data, better yet, by using software that respects your freedom: https://www.fsf.org/about/.
 
Ingo said:
True, BUT: the word "serves" implies that software is there for the user, not the other way round. Sooner or later, with all proprietary software, this is in conflict with business goals.

Case in point: IIUC, Cliff could have made progress if, at least, his emails weren't locked in to Outlook, but instead stored in a free format --- but this conflicts directly with MicroSoft's interests.

The first step on the way out: avoid vendor lock-in at (virtually) all costs --- at the very least by controlling your own data, better yet, by using software that respects your freedom: https://www.fsf.org/about/.
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Forgive my ignorance here, but what free file format exists that can manage messages, calendars, to-do lists, notes, and contacts? And what free viewing software is available that uses these file formats?

Actually, I'm not completely ignorant here - I can name one such file format - the Outlook PST file format. It is fully documented with an open license. Granted, it's not a trivial file format because it is actually an ISAM style database with transaction support. There are free PST viewers available. There are .NET libraries to work with PST files that run on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS (not sure about Android).

The Windows file formats and exposed protocols are documented and free. The Office XML document formats used by MS Office are an ECMA standard. The Microsoft website has a rather extensive library of open file format/protocol specifications.
 
Regarding Microsoft QA.... I worked for a game company in the early 2000s and we got bought out by Microsoft. I remember being extremely impressed by their QA engineers - these were people who not only checked for bugs but were able to write software to stress-test parts of the system, collate results, etc etc. (That being said, prior to this we were famous with Nintendo QA for submitting the most buggy software of all development studios....) More recently, we have an ex Microsoft QA guy at my current place, and he's equally if not even more impressive.
 
FractalAudio said:
I hate Outlook Web App with a passion. Search is useless. Whenever you scroll it tries to combine messages and jumps back to the top. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
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Have you looked at it lately compared to Outlook? These were my complaints about OWA but eventually Outlook itself seemed to grow the same problems- presumably as they consolidated the code.
 
I was just thinking of going ahead and buying or subscribing to 365. But I'm using the Apple equivalents. 6 months ago when I was considering it I realized Pages open all my Word documents and can save them in the same. Same with the other apps like Keynote-Powerpoint, Numbers-Excel. WTF? Why spend money especially when it breaks like this. So far this hasn't broken.
 
FractalAudio said:
I go to launch Outlook and it just closes after a couple seconds. So I run the repair program and it's hung. A search online reveals that many others are having the same issue. Thanks for forcing an update on me that broke all my Office apps. Dicks.
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Microsoft employee here! Let me know how I can help. Could try to refer you to folks here if that would help too.
 
FractalAudio said:
I go to launch Outlook and it just closes after a couple seconds. So I run the repair program and it's hung. A search online reveals that many others are having the same issue. Thanks for forcing an update on me that broke all my Office apps. Dicks.
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Ive been supporting MS apps for well over 20 years, Id be happy to help if you cant get it fixed....
 
tfodor said:
Microsoft employee here! Let me know how I can help. Could try to refer you to folks here if that would help too.
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Can you get the folks who work on Outlook's desktop app and the folks who work on the online Outlook to agree on one set of filtering and allowable tags, styles, html attributes, etc., to make constructing an HTML email a bit less of a pain?
 
hippietim said:
Forgive my ignorance here, but what free file format exists that can manage messages, calendars, to-do lists, notes, and contacts? And what free viewing software is available that uses these file formats?

Actually, I'm not completely ignorant here - I can name one such file format - the Outlook PST file format. It is fully documented with an open license. Granted, it's not a trivial file format because it is actually an ISAM style database with transaction support. There are free PST viewers available. There are .NET libraries to work with PST files that run on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS (not sure about Android).

The Windows file formats and exposed protocols are documented and free. The Office XML document formats used by MS Office are an ECMA standard. The Microsoft website has a rather extensive library of open file format/protocol specifications.
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I have a feeling you know much more about the details of these formats than I do; that's ok, I was speaking about the issue as a matter of principle.

To address your points, it is my opinion that "messages, calendars, to-do lists, notes, and contacts" need not be managed in the same format. But if the Outlook PST format indeed does that and has free complete implementations, fine with me. It still sounds to me that it is far from easy, as a user, to put this approach into practice --- as opposed to, say, having all your messages trivially accessible in the standard maildir format.

As for the Office XML formats.. uuuh, that's a nasty story. It is widely accepted that Microsoft coopted the standardization process (paying for shill representatives, "somehow" getting countries to abstain from casting the negative vote of the country's technical committee etc), mainly just to prevent the existing "open document format" from becoming a (much simpler and already implemented) standard.

They were essentially just buying a stamp of approval for a format they would dictate. No wonder the current set of office XML specs weighs in at a (zipped!) folder of >50MB. You know, like, totally sensible for a handful of file formats, and not at all designed such that only a huge company with basically unlimited resources could implement it... ;) And that's before talking about any problems with the content of these thousands of pages..

It's examples like these that lead me to not being interested in Microsoft satisfying any "formal" requirements when it comes to freedom and openness. They have a huge business to care for, and that's, fairly reasonably, their primary concern.
 
Ingo said:
I have a feeling you know much more about the details of these formats than I do; that's ok, I was speaking about the issue as a matter of principle.

To address your points, it is my opinion that "messages, calendars, to-do lists, notes, and contacts" need not be managed in the same format. But if the Outlook PST format indeed does that and has free complete implementations, fine with me. It still sounds to me that it is far from easy, as a user, to put this approach into practice --- as opposed to, say, having all your messages trivially accessible in the standard maildir format.

As for the Office XML formats.. uuuh, that's a nasty story. It is widely accepted that Microsoft coopted the standardization process (paying for shill representatives, "somehow" getting countries to abstain from casting the negative vote of the country's technical committee etc), mainly just to prevent the existing "open document format" from becoming a (much simpler and already implemented) standard.

They were essentially just buying a stamp of approval for a format they would dictate. No wonder the current set of office XML specs weighs in at a (zipped!) folder of >50MB. You know, like, totally sensible for a handful of file formats, and not at all designed such that only a huge company with basically unlimited resources could implement it... ;) And that's before talking about any problems with the content of these thousands of pages..

It's examples like these that lead me to not being interested in Microsoft satisfying any "formal" requirements when it comes to freedom and openness. They have a huge business to care for, and that's, fairly reasonably, their primary concern.
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maildir? Uh.... Since we're telling jokes:

Did you hear about the mathematician who’s afraid of negative numbers?
He’ll stop at nothing to avoid them.

:tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy:

As for using a much "simpler and already implemented" standard, where was the existing standard formats that could handle everything that a Word, Excel, or Powerpoint document could contain? To use any of the existing formats would make it impossible to save documents in those formats without losing formatting and/or data.

I know nothing of the process that happened to get these specs produced but I think it's pretty reasonable that Microsoft would want to make sure the formats were capable of storing the existing Office document capabilities completely. Think about it, if they had settled on anything less then customers that used any of the unsupported capabilities would not be able to use these new formats.

Regarding the size of the specs, yeah - they're big. Did you happen to notice that about a third of the size is image files? These docs cover the XML specification for every single thing that you can have in a Word, Excel, or Powerpoint document. You may not realize or appreciate the breadth and depth of what can be encapsulated in those documents, but it's a lot. A whole lot.

Just curious - have you looked at the size of other document specs? The HTML spec is huge - 20MB+ the last time I downloaded a copy. The CSS spec is painfully large and terse. XML, XSL, and friends make CSS look like a quick read. And so on. And this is a good time to point out that these open document types are fine examples of formats that only a huge company or other large group of developers could implement.
 
Yeah, it's a 20+ year old codebase that people are now afraid to touch in some places, both on the server and on the client side. The most significant changes they make nowadays is rearranging buttons on the toolbar in every release. The underlying software still sucks ass.

Plus the quality of MS "talent" has gone down a lot as higher paying competitors like Amazon, FB, Google and others have hired away the best engineers. You get what you pay for.
 
For whats its worth I'm using the latest version of outlook, I just did a security update the other day and most of my interface changed... font, icons, placement of icons, behavior, point is you need to move on people that developed a platform quit, retire, die, etc. and the product UI people get new directions, if you know a better client than Outlook please let me know.. BTW Gmail is garbage...
Cheers...
 
plexi59 said:
Yeah, it's a 20+ year old codebase that people are now afraid to touch in some places, both on the server and on the client side. The most significant changes they make nowadays is rearranging buttons on the toolbar in every release. The underlying software still sucks ass.

Plus the quality of MS "talent" has gone down a lot as higher paying competitors like Amazon, FB, Google and others have hired away the best engineers. You get what you pay for.
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What a complete load of crap.
 
Microsoft's file explorer basically looks and operates the same as it did in windows 95, and is pathetic and mostly useless. How about improving the search capabilities with tags, or colors, or other ways to categorize, filter, search?

We can color code amp models and filter colors on the AX8 for God's sake!!!
 
tfodor said:
Microsoft employee here! Let me know how I can help. Could try to refer you to folks here if that would help too.
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This is a bashing session it appears, the theme is to vent on a company that continues to evolve... good, bad who knows but personally I'd like to go back to Outlook 95 that was hands down the best!
 
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