[nine_k]

I won't be surprised if there is an effort to rewrite MSO in something like Dart and WASM, and make it independent from any native toolkits altogether. Yes, to reproduce all of the Excel power, and make it available everywhere as a premium plan of O365.

Then Windows could pull a ChromeOS. The only place where a native UI is really needed is the lock / login screen; a tiny subset of any current UI toolkit would suffice.

[p_ing]

Office is a completely separate team divorced from Windows proper. Unless Office deemed it wise to rewrite their UI, they're not going to do so (and it's a frankenstein of a Win32 UI).

Office on Windows relies heavily on COM and other Win32-only libraries to function.

I can't think of a valid reason to rewrite Office to that extent. They already have Office for the web and Mac Office; while not identical in features, they're often good enough outside of BI scenarios or highly complex Excel work.

Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to have Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook be identical, so those are getting their rewrites with removal of Win32-specific features where applicable.

[pjmlp]

Before Project Reunion came to be, Office team was starting to adopt UWP.

See BUILD recordings from 2018, I think, where they demo the new UWP controls contributed by the team, similarly to what happened before with the ribbon on Windows 7.

I would vouch they got as happy as the rest of us.

[p_ing]

Those versions in the Office store are d.e.d. Except for OneNote for Windows 10 which is shortly on it's way out.

[pjmlp]

Yes, because of how UWP and Project Reunion went down, right after they started looking into it.

[mroche]

> Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to have Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook be identical, so those are getting their rewrites with removal of Win32-specific features where applicable.

I wish they didn't. Outlook on macOS is abysmal nowadays and I still find myself resorting to the legacy view just to change some settings that both iterations can read but only one exposes.

I significantly prefer using Thunderbird or the web views for Gmail and Zoho Mail over any version of Outlook. Is the integration across O365 apps nice? Sure, but the platforms themselves are miserable to use.

In a similar vein, I was cautiously optimistic about Teams V2 for unifying the client. But then they completely dropped the Linux client for their PWA which does not have feature parity with the "native" platforms and has a significantly worse UX.

[tracker1]

I think that Outlook as an experience has become significantly worse as o254 has advanced... I understand some of the reasons, such as managing millions of inboxes vs a few dozen on a private server. That said, it's kind of a mess.

I used Thunderbird for years, mostly to keep my NNTP feeds going, at some point, my mailboxes corrupted between versions (the NNTP site I was using didn't work right anymore) and I just kind of gave up at that point. It was in the dark time, before the more recent resurgence of dev activity, but NNTP didn't seem to be even a tangential focus.

I'd love to see a relatively easy open-source server for mail+contacts+calender that allowed the level of visibility, management and sharing that Outlook+Exchange/o365 offers. Right now, I have some of that, but not nearly the same.

Edit: Also, really sick of getting meeting change notifications in Teams for a meeting that is months away... just leave any meeting notifications beyond today/tomorrow in outlook, I don't need them in my workgroup app.

[nine_k]

No, MSO should not be rewritten. It might be adapted to a more universal UI toolkit, if Win32 UI becomes problematic as is. COM is also not going to go anywhere, but I wonder if WASM-compiled components and native code-compiled components could interact via DCOM over the internet.

[larodi]

It makes a lot of sense to wire COM and WASM in some smart way.