Outlook Not So Good

Last night I was ready to go to bed when I decided to quickly send someone an email from my Yahoo account, which I use for business. I needed to give them someone else’s email address so I went to my personal Hotmail account to look the address up. That took me four times longer and many more clicks than usual. Why? Because the Hotmail account that I’ve used since 1996 was dead and gone. It had been commandeered and replaced by Outlook.

For a few months every time I logged in, a popup would ask if I’d like to try Outlook. I skipped over it. No, I wouldn’t like to try it. I’ve already tried it at work and I find it cumbersome and frustrating. It is not intuitive. It is more trouble than it’s worth.

But, Microsoft wasn’t really asking if I wanted to change to Outlook. It was telling me that I was getting Outlook whether I wanted it or not. My answer didn’t matter. “No” doesn’t mean “no” to Microsoft.

The day after the invasion, I Googled “Outlook Hotmail switchover,” to research the situation. The results fell into three categories: business writers gushing praise for Outlook, coverage of the massive March Outlook outage, and disgruntled Hotmail users who want their old accounts back.

The business writers focused on how Outlook will be competitive with Gmail and Yahoo. They are giddy about Outlook’s capabilities to connect more easily to I-phones, send massive amounts of photos, etc. But their job is to talk up anything new, and to convince readers that new is automatically better.  They are not unbiased journalists. They are like movie reviewers, who rarely give any new technology less than four stars. I got the impression they had lifted the promotional copy directly from Microsoft press releases and pasted it into their articles.

Pay close attention to the doublespeak in this article: “Microsoft, it is worth noting, always gave Hotmail users the option to move to the new Outlook.com, but it will now actively prompt users to do so and also email them to remind them that they can switch.” Now Microsoft is “actively prompting users” sort of like how fascist dictators “actively prompt” citizens to get onboard with the new regime.

The second group of Google hits are articles about the Outlook outage in mid-March that was a result of overheated servers. The outage left Outlook.com and Hotmail users without access to their email for almost 16 hours. Whenever there are massive technology switchovers, there are glitches. The coverage of the outage was a little vague about overheated servers, and included the fact that Microsoft apologized.

The last group of Outlook/Hotmail hits is the one that I fall into—unhappy former Hotmail users. The discussion centers on why they hate Outlook. I’ve had to use Outlook for one of my jobs. It is not user friendly. It is not as intuitive as Hotmail was. I waste a lot of time trying to navigate around it.

Setting aside the whole debate over whether Outlook is better than Hotmail, or Gmail, or Yahoo, what I find disturbing is the way Microsoft handled the coercion, oops, the “conversion.” Outlook.com’s senior director, Dharmesh Mehta said, "We are trying to push people who have gotten lazy and comfortable with an email service that may not be all that great and help show them what email can really do for them."

So, because your customer is happy with your product, that customer is lazy and comfortable? When did insulting the customer become a good way to get them to try your new product? Maybe Mehta is not arrogant or patronizing. Despite the fact that I’ve never met Mehta, maybe he’s right and I am lazy. I don’t have the time or inclination to take tutorials to learn a whole new system that has features I won’t use—like the ability to send 100s of photos more easily. I don’t want to work hard at my email. I have other things to work hard at.

I have four email accounts: two Hotmail accounts on msn.com, one on Yahoo, and one on Gmail. By far, Hotmail was the one that I used the most. At 11:00 the other night when I discovered that Outlook had taken over my screen, did I jump at the chance to take the tutorial to learn the new system? Nope. Did I appreciate the new streamlined screen? Nope. I was angry that my toolbar was gone and I couldn’t find my contact list.

Was I impressed with the ads? No. I was frustrated that if I miscalculated slightly in sliding the bar down through my inbox, I was suddenly in the middle of an advertisement for a product I wasn’t interested in. When I went to the ad settings, there isn’t an option to block ads, only the self-assured option that assumes I want to add more preferences to what kinds of ads I like to see.

Here are some examples from the “Welcome” email from the Outlook team showing how counter-intuitive Outlook is to me. “To compose a new email, click "New". To add a recipient, click "To", or click the box just below it.”  Why does “New” mean compose a new email message? Couldn’t it mean you’ve just received a new email message? Or add a new contact? Why doesn’t it just say “compose?” Why does “To” mean add a new recipient? Wouldn’t “add contact” make more sense? Oh, they mean who I’m sending the email message “to.”

“To Print an email On the main menu bar, click the "..." symbol.” An ellipsis, or a series of dots usually indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence or whole section from the original text being quoted. Why do three dots mean “print” on Outlook? And why is that a better icon than a picture of a printer or the word “Print?” Why didn’t Microsoft stick to the icons they used in Hotmail, or in Word?

Maybe eventually I’d get used to Outlook, but is it worth the trouble? It’s easier for me to use my Yahoo and Gmail accounts which I already know how to use than to spend time out looking for my messages and contacts on Outlook. The fact that there are 37,900,000 links to sites with instructions on how to use the new Outlook email confirms that it is not intuitive, and tells me that a lot of people who already have Yahoo or Gmail accounts, like me, will probably just abandon Hotmail/Outlook.

Microsoft has spent $30 million and may go up to $90 million advertising Outlook. That’s throwing a whole lot of money to get people to try a FREE service, especially considering 350 million current users are being forced onto Outlook anyway. One of the articles about the switch said, “Microsoft is so confident it has the Internet’s best email service that it is about to spend at least $30 million to send its message across the U.S.” That doesn’t seem confident to me. Just because Outlook spends a lot of money to keep saying it is better, doesn’t mean it IS better.

Why didn’t they spend $30 million asking hotmail users what they liked about hotmail? Why didn’t they take some of that money and research which features Gmail and Yahoo users like and add those to Hotmail? They could have left the original Hotmail intact and named the new email site LavaMail or something clever to show people how much better it was. What does “Outlook” have to do with communicating or sending and receiving information?

Clicking the help button in my Outlook account I found this answer to “Why can’t I switch back to Hotmail?”

Thanks for being a loyal Hotmail customer. As part of the transition from Hotmail to Outlook.com—the next generation of free email from Microsoft—there is no longer an option to switch back.

Your Hotmail address and password, saved emails, contacts, calendars, and rules were automatically moved to your new Outlook.com inbox. You have the option to keep your @Hotmail address and/or get an @Outlook.com address.

We think Outlook.com builds on the great tools in Hotmail, and we hope you’ll agree. You get all the features you loved in Hotmail, like Sweep and one-click Unsubcribe, along with new features like archiving and a refreshed design. Outlook.com helps you see and do more from your inbox quickly. The streamlined interface shows more messages at a glance, and the new toolbar helps you complete everyday email tasks with fewer clicks.

For more information about the upgrade, including a video on how to zip through basic email tasks in Outlook.com, see My Hotmail account was upgraded to Outlook.com.

              

Mulling over why I was so angry at Microsoft’s attitude, I re-read the message from the Outlook team, and I keyed in on the words “customer” and “free.” Did I really have any right to be angry about a product that I wasn’t paying for? Probably not. We “loyal Hotmail customers” don’t have the leverage of threatening to take our money and spend it on someone else’s email service. And that explains why Microsoft can do whatever it pleases. 

The “customer” that they have to please is any company buying advertising on Outlook. So, even though email is such an integral part of people’s daily lives, the users are only indirectly figured into this equation. The more users Outlook has, the more they can charge for advertising space.

         So Outlook is similar to the three original TV networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Those three lost their clout because cable diluted the market, and since they were complacent due to the limited competition they were used to, they didn’t change quickly enough to keep their audiences. Outlook isn’t guilty of that mistake.

          While I understand Microsoft’s motivation, I still don’t like the way the change was handled. But this seems to be the new way that business in America handles transitions. Facebook regularly changes things, like adding Timeline, by going through a period of begging you to try something new, and then just forcing it on you whether you want it or not.

         It’s not just for-profit businesses using this new tactic. I attended many local school district meetings that proclaimed they wanted the public’s input into situations, but they had already made the decision about what we were discussing. The city I live in held a meeting for our neighborhood residents over installing traffic calming devices. Even though there were some people opposed to it, and even though they said there would be a vote on it, the next morning spray painted lines appeared on the road where the speed humps were being installed.

        What offends me is when businesses and government agencies act like they value your opinion, and are offering you a choice, when that’s not true at all. Why don’t they just be up front and announce that they’re upgrading, or trying something new, or downsizing, explain why, and tell us when it will happen? Why the song and dance? Why act like they care about our opinion when we’re really just numbers?

         Microsoft says that over one-third of Outlook.com’s 60 million active users have switched from Gmail. 306 million users have already chosen Gmail, and 293 million chose Yahoo, voluntarily. I couldn’t find any data on how much overlap there is to account for people like me with multiple email services. Time will tell how many will “migrate” to Outlook. 

My Magic 8-Ball predicts: Outlook Not So Good.

Laura Keolanui Stark is implementing her own email conversion. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.