Andy Delin not impressed with Outlook 2007
Is Andy Delin the new Scoble? A Microsoft blogger with enough balls / management support to say what he thinks even when it may not be completely obsequious? Let’s hope so… especially after I post this up there!
His recent review of Outlook 2007 : "so far I haven’t found too many changes of significance… In my opinion, Outlook is an irony - a productivity tool which distracts and overloads. Outlook knows so much about me - my contacts, my activities, my communications - and yet it doesn’t use this knowledge to guide what information should be given or hidden in a given context."
He’s also made some very interesting insights into why my decision to go back to pen and paper is a good one (and, by the way, I’m still loving it):
An elegant moleskine notebook may be expensive, but in fact, the cost and quality brings a certain respect for your thoughts. You won’t throw that thing away when it’s full, and the book itself is robust enough to preserve your thoughts for years. In time to come, you’ll pick up that elegant moleskine book and flipping through, you’ll recall what you were thinking about in 2006, what you were trying to achieve, what you aspired to and what you were struggling with. This is beautiful. Dare I mention PDAs and Outlook in the same paragraph? Those things are disrespectful of human markings, they are almost programmed to forget. They aren’t trustworthy containers (remember ‘trustworthy computing’ ?).
Trustworthy. Exactly. I’ve lost SO MUCH DATA from Outlook and my PDA over the years it’s disgusting. The whole OST / PST mindfield that Microsoft imposes on you in the name of an Outlook backup is still a complete joke. If I want to find a particular email from the last ten years that I wrote in Outlook, first I’d need to find the right PST. I’ve got them all backed up on CD somewhere, but there is about 20 of the suckers. Each time I re-built my laptop I had to back it up and then would normally start a new one to get the old one off my harddrive. Not to mention the many times I had to re-build Outlook due to PST corruptions. So I’d have to import various PSTs into Outlook and then search the lot of them for the right email.
Now compare that to finding a Gmail message from 2004 (when I started using it in anger). Takes two seconds. One maybe.
Anyway… paper is good. I’m loving it. However, I still haven’t worked out a good way to back it up without doing a daily scan.
March 15th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
With the new search facility in Outlook, I find it just as easy to find mail in outlook as I do in gmail. Granted, it takes a bit more organisation on your part and the decision not to archive but you can’t say that gmail is better featured than Outlook.
The main problem I have with Outlook is the way it helps me with everyday tasks. I find myself needing Franklin Covey’s Plan Plus installed to get the most from the application and what pains me is that nine times out of ten, you need some kind of add-in to make Outlook that killer app. The plus side of it is though, that Outlook is flexible to the point where it can be used as a productivity assistant, PIM or just a simple mail client. It’s the perfect skeleton, but it’s up to you where you add the meat.