Microsoft Outlook, Office Watch / Email, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook /

Faster Outlook - what took them so long?

by Office Watch 29 April 2009

Microsoft boasts of a 26% faster Outlook 2007 – why a two year wait?

We’re promised a faster Outlook 2007 with Service Pack 2, however promises that “Outlook 2007 SP2 is 26 percent faster than its predecessor on a set of common e-mail tasks and is even faster, 35 percent, with larger mailboxes” link seem ‘over the top’ to the point of stretching credulity.

We can’t say that we’ve noticed any particular improvement during daily use but some careful benchmarking may well show some improvements.

We’d like to hear from any Outlook 2007 users with Service Pack 2. Use our feedback page to tell us have you noticed any difference – good or bad – in performance since applying SP2?

If Outlook 2007 SP2 is now as fast as Microsoft claims – what were they doing during the development of Outlook 2007 originally, to say nothing of Service Pack 1? Why has it taken Microsoft so many years to repair such a badly optimized data storage system?

A 26% speed improvement is a substantial change – not a few minor tweaks. The ‘softies who acheived this deserve credit for their work – but Microsoft looks very bad indeed.

If we accept Microsoft’s figures, anyone using Outlook 2007 since its release at the start of 2007 has been using a program that was at least 20% slower (we’re being generous) than it needed to be! That’s no small difference or tweaking – it suggests a fundamentally and knowingly sluggish product was sold for an extended period of time. It’s hard to accept that, between the release of Service Pack 1 and now, Microsoft suddenly discovered previously unknown and major problems in Outlook 2007.

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Would anyone like to work out the millions of wasted hours that adds up for the millions of Outlook users across the globe? Large companies might consider the lost productivity costs the next time they hear about the promised productivity saving in buying a new version of Office.

An analogy – you hear that your two year old car can now get 20% better fuel economy after a quick warranty service to fix a design fault. You’d be wondering about all the money you’d wasted at the gas station and maybe how you can get it back.

Certainly any company that decided to wait for Outlook 2007 to get a service pack or two isn’t looking so silly now.

Microsoft should not be boasting about a “26 percent faster” Outlook – they should be apologizing to customers and hanging their heads in shame for selling such badly flawed software for so long.

Faster Outlook - what took them so long?

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