Let’s take a deeper look at the latest announcement about the change to a new Outlook for Windows “Outlook (new)”. What it says, what Microsoft does NOT say and a close look at the much quoted ‘2029’ date.
Here’s a few things that occur to us after carefully noting what’s mentioned and not mentioned in the latest announcement. See How the change to new Outlook for Windows will work
No mention of consumer Outlook
The guidance is for ‘commercial’ versions of Outlook, meaning Microsoft 365 licenses for business and enterprise.
The changeover plan could be different for consumer (Family/Personal) though it’s likely to be similar. We predicted that Microsoft would be more aggressive in terms of dates and being ‘pushy’ about moving to Outlook (new).
And that’s what’s happened, there’s a forced move to Outlook (new) in April 2026 for commercial customers.
No Dates
The noticeable omission from the blog post are any dates. Aside from the mention of ‘2029’ (more on that in a moment) there’s no indication of when the various changes will happen. That’s mostly because Microsoft hasn’t decided yet.
It will be interesting to watch this ‘staged approach’ and ‘multi-year journey’ as it unfolds. There’s likely to be changes to the rollout of Outlook (new) from what’s currently announced.
Optimism or Delusion?
According to Microsoft
“new Outlook for Windows … is getting closer to readiness for General Availability”
Is that optimism or delusional? There’s no way the current Outlook (new) is anywhere near ready for “General Availability” except in the self-interest of Microsoft.
Microsoft is determined to continue pushing their new Outlook to more people while it still lacks important features and has a massive privacy breach for non-Microsoft hosted mailboxes.
General Availability
“General Availability” (GA) is term is used by Microsoft to mean different things for different products. “General” doesn’t mean everyone. Most likely Microsoft will remove the ‘Preview’ label.
For Outlook (new) it does NOT mean the software is finalized.
It does NOT mean Outlook (new) has the features that many customers will need to replace classic Outlook.
‘General Availability’ just means there’s enough features in place that Microsoft feels it can remove the ‘Preview’ tag with a straight face.
Naming of the two Outlooks
There’s now a name for the current Outlook for Windows, as distinct from the up-and-coming replacement.
The current and long-standing Outlook will be known as ‘classic Outlook for Windows’, at least for the moment. At some stage that will probably change to the denigrating label ‘legacy’ .
The new release is called “new Outlook for Windows” though sometimes “Outlook (new)”.
See Too many Microsoft Outlook’s – we explain them all which has been updated to include these name changes.
Apparently it’s too much to ask Microsoft for consistent and clear naming of their Outlook products. The change of Outlook for Windows is hard enough on paying customers without having to cope with inconsistent and changing labels.
About that ‘2029’ support end date
The ‘2029’ date has been much quoted, as Microsoft intended, but it’s worth examining the statement more closely.
“We will continue to honor published support timelines for existing version of classic Outlook for Windows until at least 2029.”
That means support for classic Outlook in Office 2016, Office 2019 and Office 2021 will still end on their support end dates in 2025, 2025 and 2026 respectively.
The ‘2029’ date only applies for the Microsoft 365 version of Outlook classic and “Office 2024” (which ends support in 2029 anyway).
The ‘at least 2029’ doesn’t mean that Microsoft won’t try every means at their disposal to, shall we say, “encourage” people to move sooner.
Finally, the long and rambling Microsoft blog post seems to suffer from either over-collaboration or too much reliance on Copilot rewrites.
How the change to new Outlook for Windows will work
Too many Microsoft Outlook’s – we explain them all
New ‘Follow’ option is really a bad sign for Outlook customers
