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- Hacker News
- As Casey Muratori likes to say, “My superpower is that I’m old, so I remember when computers used to be fast.”by fwlr
- Man, I've really been falling into his stuff. So refreshing to hear someone speak from a perspective of care. It's good for my soul in this world of slop.by rafterydj
- I remember them being dog slow. People used to joke about loading bars going backwards. But Windows did peak with 7.by frollogaston
- I wish we had more Casey Muratoris and less Sam Altmans.by reddalo
- It's really hard to understand how these trillion dollar companies somehow can't afford to maintain quality apps. Seems every new Office release makes things worse. I assume the WebView2 makes things a little easier for devs but how much are they really saving at the expense of quality? And I have no idea what the product managers are doing. They are certainly not thinking about improving the product. The new Outlook and Teams feel like they are being hacked together by a bunch of interns that are trying out Scrum.by vjvjvjvjghv
- Wait, which Outlook is this? Is it "new Outlook" or "Outlook (new)"?by nticompass
- Outlook CoPilot Legacy But Also Preview
- Apparently, not the one that comes inside Copilot :)by marcosdumay
- Or Outlook.com, their free webmail alternative to Gmail?
- It's the one that nags you to upload all your IMAP passwords and email to Microsoft's cloud.by Sesse__
- Copy (5) of Outlook (2).final.revised.4.exeby aboardRat4
- The latest version of "Legacy Outlook" on Mac has a huge bug now: "Replying to or forwarding an email does not include the original message in the email body in legacy Outlook for Mac" [1]
So now i am forced to use this New Outlook crapware at last. And it is crap. Its slow as a dog, every action takes 1s. Why do they rearrange all the buttons, change all the fonts... why don't they just copy the old interface 1:1 ? Who knows...
If I have to use this new version for longer than 2 weeks I am switching to some other client.
And also, who knows, maybe they are purposefully inserting these show-stopping bugs to get people to switch.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/replying-to-or-for...
by tacker2000 - I second the sentiment, it’s unbelievably annoying. Even more so when the suggested solution from the “support” appears to be “You can downgrade to a version before we introduced this bug”. I’m not even gonna try switching to that new crapware, I’m just going to change client altogether.by n0on3
- They have enough employees to build native apps that run super quick but are still seduced by the web portability argument which, as we all know, is mostly untrue even now and which introduces all kinds of non-deterministic latencies/errors, which cannot all be handled neatly.
To be honest, this is the same in almost all apps that have any more than 10 developers working on them (my estimate!). Death by dependencies and a lack of coherent design.
As someone else said, though, some things like fastmail work OK in the browser so it is possible.
by lbriner - > They have enough employees to build native apps
They'd screw those up as well.
by bluedino - The platform is not the issue. Competent engineering teams could blow this out of the water with a single threaded jquery web app.by eudamoniac
- Native software is incredibly difficult to build well.
There are at least 4 platforms they would need to support: Win, Mac, iPhone, and Android.
That's 4 different software engineers at least, just for the frontend.
Then, there's various backend engineers, who could be shared, yes, but not always. Android's weird runtime requirements are bespoke enough that just because the database is written in C++, doesn't mean it's the same C++ database as what the Windows backend would use.
Finally, there's the designers, who end up consolidating all the unique things about each native platform into a common design language so they can have a shared vision on all of the platforms. So engineers end up building UI that works identically on all 4 platforms, and you're basically building a bespoke "browser" at that point.
by jarjoura - Calculator taking measurable seconds to load was the last straw for me for Windows 10. Exclusively Linux at home for a couple of years now, and there's a relatively steady stream of headlines to remind me of how good a decision it was to switch away.by BLKNSLVR
- Isn't it way easier to just find a better calculator app (same for most other straws)?by eviks
- Thankfully, that has improved, but there's still a weird bug where multiple instances of the calculator will spawn for no reason at all.by projektfu
- I switched in 2023 or so, I have not seen one headline per your example or anecdote or comment or tea leaves that have made me question moving away from windows.
Not one, not once. Even my worst day on Linux where something does work for seemingly no reason, still better than Windows.
- Yeah, I've been exclusively on Linux at home since 2019. I have to do work on Windows though and it's a daily reminder that Windows is a piece of shit and gets worse with every update. WSL is the only thing that makes it bearable. It's like releasing a long relaxing breath when I can finally get on my home computer.by yoyohello13
- Luckily, one can still revert to the classic calculator: https://win7games.com/#calcby layer8
- Microsoft has always been careless about performance. Two anecdotes:
A friend of mine used to work for Microsoft (long ago). One day I was complaining to him about some package that Microsoft had put out. "It's so slow!" I said. He replied, nonchalantly: "buy Intel stock. People will have to upgrade their PCs!"
Second one is from about 15 years ago. At one of the local meetups, I was chatting with a long-lost friend who worked for Yahoo. He was describing their recently-concluded Search deal with Microsoft, and how it worked in practice. This was an issue he had raised with Microsoft engineers and gotten no traction on their side. (This is all from memory). Basically, he described how a search request from an European user was handled by Yahoo Search. So, say someone goes to "search.yahoo.de" and enters a search term and it triggers a request at some Yahoo server in an EU datacenter. According to the deal, that would be forwarded to a Microsoft server, based in Virginia. Now, since the request was from EU, the Microsoft server would turn around and make a request to a MS server based in EU. Which would then respond with the search results to the MS server in VA. Which would then send the response back to the Yahoo server in EU. So, basically, 4 cross-Atlantic hops for one search request. He claimed latency figures of around 1500ms, when their internal goal was to keep latency below 300ms (after which it becomes noticeable and hurts metrics?). But when he brought up this massive latency spike to his counterparts in MS, they just shrugged it off.
by mlmonkey - They routed the search to Virginia for surveillance, I hope that is clear to you.by bflesch
- Genuinely curious how quality is so poor at MS. Tech debt and deadlines and red tape?
This is the company that invented the term dogfooding and forced everyone to use Exchange until all the bugs were worked out.
I’m building a next gen web mail app at work and there are a ton of UX edge cases but the performance of the core UI is not rocket science.
I’m looking for help play testing to squash bugs, improve the last mile of performance, and to add Outlook support.
The incentive is the mail app is “malleable” so you can craft custom workflows and UI widgets to help you get to inbox zero.
by nzoschke - At some point they gave up on quality control. Not sure why but things went downhill at Microsoft years ago already. With the rise of AI slop and Microsoft turning into microslop, this trend just became amplified.by shevy-java
- It’s funny because your demo is full of spinners.
- I clicked, saw this "The email app with its own AI agent" and closed. Another "Let's shove AI into something".
Outlook already provides me this, it's terrible at it since context is key and context is probably buried in several places it has access to and despite that access, it still falls flat.
by stackskipton - I work in what used to be Exchange. (my opinions are my own).
There is no one reason for the quality issues. It's a thousand small decisions and problems that have compound against each other over decades, coupled with the sheer feature complexity+scope+impact and multiplied by the titanic scale and volume the platform handles.
Additionally, the engineering culture really prioritizes backwards compatibility for customers (for good reasons) which bleeds into all aspects of the platform/decisions in both good and bad ways - and means that the big and obvious step-change platform improvements that could be made internally to make things better are not really invested in, or are deemed to expensive.
It's still a great place to work, and I'm proud that my work is in some small way directly contributing to and helping billions of people's work lives but there's still a long road ahead to improving the customer experience of using the platform for both internal and external customers.
by klop1324