![]() (she has expressed displeasure with the idea of upgrading due to possible UI changes) She has a /HUGE/ amount of stuff already written using Word, and moving that to anything else would be a herculean undertaking which is, honestly, not worth her time. (like another commenter mentioned) She's already familiar and comfortable with using Word, and so she can be productive and just get things done by sticking to what she knows. I suspect a large part of the reason she sticks with it though is threefold: familiarity, volume of content in the Word format, and working with agents/publishers. I know she uses some features such as adding notes to pieces of text (which I know she uses to track what she needs to work on/revisit later, etc.), but I don't know how many of those features she uses or how many advanced features she touches. I can't say specifically why she values using Word as her text editor of choice, due to not being in her head. I gradually learned as a PM that often a more impactful but riskier product strategy is to go big-instead of fixing 50 small issues a week at a time, fix 1 big issue that takes a year but renders the 50 irrelevant. It was shaky from the start, there were so many problems and customer complaints. When I started on Entourage, the team was executing on a strategy to shove Exchange capability into a consumer-oriented app. When we got to building Outlook, we decided to look forward-Cocoa and EWS only, building a strong base so that future releases could be far more capable. Instead, we did a release of Entourage with WebDAV (a horrible protocol that Exchange barely ever supported) and a free update with just EWS support (also rough initially, but much better designed and fuller-featured). The result would have introduced by confusing UX but also reduce reliability of both solutions (adds a lot of testing complexity). We looked at supporting both WebDAV and EWS. Maybe different now-back then, nearly everyone only had a single Exchange account. We ended-up with Outlook 2011's database which still bites folks from time to time but has a lot more "recoverability" than previous products such as Entourage (where it users often cited being locked-out of their database). We couldn't get the perf we wanted out of that system. During development, we even had builds where the entire underlying database was exposed as XML docs (one per item in your db). we really wanted a place where, even if your app crashed, you could always get the data out of the app. Little insider history: we did a lot to try and make sure data didn't get locked-in. The app was far from as full-featured as some users wanted (especially Win Outlook switchers) BUT did make enough progress to avoid the backlash of other "rewrites" out there (e.g. Updating the Export feature was one of those trade-offs (it's just not a super frequent user activity) that part of Outlook leveraged code from the much-despised Microsoft Entourage. We rebuilt the thing in Cocoa with an entirely new Exchange client codebase-it was a beast of a project done in a fairly short period of time.įor better or worse, there were a lot of edges we didn't get a chance to smooth out by the ship date though I believe we made reasonably solid trade-off calls based on the team and deadlines we had. I was the PM who led Outlook for Mac 2011 so I know many, many of those tricks. Bill, where are you? Surely this is easier than Malaria. Plus this is an old product for them, just new to the mac. They are not an early entrant here they need to do better than the competition, not notably worse. The tagging fiasco and lack of export are both unconscionable though and embarrassing, imo. Anyway, they don't appear to have screwed that up. ![]() Which, to be honest, is what I would have done too since it's pretty good. But they did this largely by copying google's two-factor auth stuff. I will say that they seem to have nailed all the account management, in particular two-factor auth, for the 'microsoft accounts'. You don't appear to be able to search for items matching a given tag. Even more bizarre, they seem to be only visual labels. And only the ones that the people at MS thought you might think were important. So you have 'Definition' and 'Idea' (which thankfully is not "Idea!") and 'To do priority 2'. There are tags, but they are canned and the user can't add their own tags. In fact, if you prefer tagging, look elsewhere. One Note will, however, appeal to people who prefer 'structuring' over 'tagging'. (Evernote has a fine export capability, fwiw). There is a 'Share as PDF' which is (a) not the same, and (b) broken for me because 'my email program is not set up properly' which is false. ![]() Most notable, there is no export functionality. Predictably, it does not play well others. Against my better judgment, I downloaded it and poked around.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |