When "New" versions are a downgrade
A few months ago, Microsoft had a prompt in Teams: Try "NEW Teams!" So I did, figuring that I'd be forced to upgrade to it sooner or later anyway. It was a slight downgrade, with the new features giving me more grief than benefits. Fine, it still worked and performed its core function.
Today though, Outlook was the latest application to give me a "Try the new version!" button. Using the same logic - that I would be forced into it sooner or later - I gave it a try. What I got was a major downgrade.
The "New" Outlook is essentially a progressive web app. What you get when you "upgrade" to the New Outlook is the web version of Outlook wrapped in a Window. It looks good enough, very "modern". Unfortunately I didn't take enough time to dig through the settings to see if it was powerful enough to be my daily email driver because there was an immediate drawback: it didn't import my shared mailboxes that I need for my job.
I didn't want to bother trying to figure out how to add these inboxes. Luckily Outlook still included categories, which I use to sort my email now (rather than simply by received date). A minor gripe about this - you can sort by category, but it only offers one sort view; you can't sort it descending or ascending. The default sort in the current Outlook is Ascending in alphabetical order, with "None" at the top. In New Outlook, it sorts Descending in alphabetical order and puts "None" at the bottom.
"None" is basically my triage category - most emails come in without a category unless I've assigned it a rule. From there I can make a decision of where I want it to sit until I deal with it. These go to the top, which for me is logical. Now they all get dumped to the bottom in New Outlook. Why? Why can't I change which direction the categories are sorted, Microsoft?
I hate when companies make these sweeping changes to software that make major changes to your workflow. I'm sure that they perform focus groups to determine whether or not these changes are a good idea but it doesn't feel like it. Or maybe they did get focus group feedback, and then ignored it. "No, it's the focus group that's wrong!" </Principal Skinner Meme>
To me it seems that up until this point, Microsoft has generally done a good job of upgrading their software to give users better functionality and useful features. But now they seem to be going backward in terms of function and looking more toward making things work in a web browser; and then they're reverse engineering the dedicated desktop apps to look the same across platforms (which includes the web).
From a personal standpoint, I don't care because I can make a choice to use a different product (and anyway, I don't use Outlook or Teams on my personal computers). But at work I'm stuck using the tools the company pays for. I just hope that we don't get forced into this New Outlook and that it remains a choice.
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