It's insane that companies continue to trust Microsoft. They've been collecting data on every company's email and office documents for ages. They must have a massive amount of insight into the inner workings, goals, and plans of so many companies across so many industries that it's a wonder how MS itself is so poorly run.
May I suggest, as a mental experiment only, that you consider for a moment that the business that they are in is not only Software but also Industrial Espionage. That ought to change your "poorly run" evaluation somewhat in a much more positive (?) direction...
If you feel adventurous you could even apply this line of thought to many other very large multinational US-led "IT" companies. Maybe that would even give you an alternative perspective on why the EU (just to mention one random non-US entity) is getting, well, less cooperative, lately.
Philosophically speaking it's an interesting path of thought, but to bring you back to real life of course there is no such thing.
This is a thought experiment only. Of course no American company would ever even think about engaging in such activities, and if you ask any employee of said company (or any of their peers) they would have absolutely no knowledge of such activity and the mere thought is outrageous, of course.
Down-votes anticipated, so this comment might not last long.
My company is all-in on everything for M$. It is truly horrifying to have all your trade secrets and security infrastructure on the servers of M$. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
When companies get more extreme with attempts to increase ad revenue, it leads me to believe they're getting squeezed for profits and this is a last ditch effort. Similar to how this "extreme chocolate chunk" cookie has 1 chocolate chunk, not extreme https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/comments/17sudbp/extr... .
And when companies all over are doing it at the same time feels like a "recession" or whatever is looming.
The new Outlook is just an Electron-style interface to a Microsoft webmail app - it's not an email client anymore. So if you want to get email from other providers, you give your credentials to the MS web app and it downloads and stores them on Microsoft's servers.
It's not particularly different from other web email apps, the issue is Microsoft is changing models from email client to web app and they're not being very upfront about it.
For the same reason I use Teams, it's what my workplace pretty much forces me to use.
There were workarounds to redirect the mail to Gmail and manage everything from there instead, but they cracked down on them one after another. The last time I didn't manage to avoid it, so now I'm stuck with that piece of crap.
There isn't honestly that many email clients left. What do you suggest they use, Thunderbird,.. and what, The Bat?
Outlook comes with Windows, it works.
What in some sense has me worried is that even Microsoft doesn't really care about native applications anymore. It's rather hard to take a software company serious, when they don't even want to develop to their own native API. The whole thing is primarily a result of Outlook becoming a blood webapp.
Is there honestly any reason why they couldn't bundle the real Outlook, the one they sell to businesses?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38219568
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38217457
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453