When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making
- Reference: 1743409807
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/03/31/opinion_column_big_tech/
- Source link:
All infuriate, all are lazy insults to users, and all should have no more place in 2025 than cassette tape data storage.
It's the last one – incomprehensible choices – that triggered a [1]manager at Microsoft to bubble over with amused sarcasm . Faced with Windows demanding he choose between Outlook New and Outlook (New) to open a link, he quipped: Why not add Outlook (Zero Sugar) and Outlook (Caffeine Free), adding some more fun options for good measure. Quite.
[2]
It's funny because it's true - Microsoft doesn't know what it's new (or New) Outlook client is called, it can't manage the courtesy of a stealth update that you only learn about once it's happened, and actually the idea of Outlook (Zero Sugar) sounds quite appealing. All it would need to do is provide the basic email functions we all use, efficiently and repeatably, with none of the weird cruft that happens when Microsoft saws bits of our limbs off to make us fit into whatever profit center is running strategy today. Which is why it can never happen. There's just no need to add a sprinkling of salt over the fresh wound by giving us unchoosable choices.
[3]
[4]
This isn't just Microsoft, although the company does have the patent on the annoyance maximisation algorithm. Want to open an attachment on Android? Up pops a list of choices, most of which are alien to our consciousness. Choose the wrong one and hey, what you won't see is your open attachment. A chance to register yet another user account, choose yet more weird permissions, and contribute to J Random Appsoft's monetization model. Oh, and do you want to do it just once, or always?
That's another unanswerable question. What if the Always is wrong – how do you undo it afterwards? Perhaps your OS makes it really easy to manage file associations, assuming you know enough about file types to get it right, but chances are you'll be web diving for an appropriate answer among a kelp forest of wrong, outdated or incomprehensible "answers." And if you pick "Just Once" and it's right, can you then tell your device "Goody! Let's go with that next time."
[5]
Hah. Multi-billion dollar ocean-boiler AI investments can't automate away the simplest requests on the system they're running on. You can ask for a picture of "an eight-legged piebald Telly Tubby juggling with the flaming heads of Elon Musk, Groucho Marx and Arnold Palmer." You can't ask "Play all media files on VLC from now on." Nor will you ever. That would mean genuine productivity gains that pry the corporate feeding proboscides from your life.
[6]Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time
[7]This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer
[8]Things are looking down for cutting-edge cosmic observatories
[9]Time to make C the COBOL of this century
Usability is a bug, not a feature, in this world. Which is why no big tech company talks about it, let alone shows any sign of putting a thousandth of the research into it. The only thing more absent from discussion is independent research data that shows the way generative LLM AI is deployed right now has any [10]detectable productivity benefits whatsoever.
This is a big opportunity for open source OS creators. An AI trained to understand system UI issues, assisting in configuration and app choice in ways that are immediate, reversible, and transferable across platforms? Yes please. Some of us have been watching this whole sorry mess evolve – or rather, not evolve – since the hopeful GUI monsters crept onto screens in the Cambrian explosion of the mid-80s. Contrary to the hype, AI can be cheap, energy efficient and very effective when it is properly focused on a known data set to fix a known problem.
Here, the known problem is twofold: usability and the user experience cannot be improved by big tech, because the business model is violently not user-centric. FOSS doesn't have this problem, it just doesn't always understand users and has no scalable mechanism of finding out what they actually want. AI could and should fix that, with the bonus that once a working project starts to show results, the whole space can move towards it.
Once the underlying data structures and semiotics of usability are rendered in a way that can train AIs – not something that will require gazillion gigabyte models and gigawatts of training energy – then progress, actual genuine measurable progress, will be swift. Usability, accessibility and all that human stuff will become an exciting engineering task rather than wetware wankery. One of FOSS's major failings will become a major strength.
[11]
This might seem like fantasy, but it's only one good research project away. We know how fast good ideas can spread in our open, interconnected information ocean. While the other guys can't even work out what their new email client is called and are just hoping the user can work it out, there's an awful lot of space to evolve into.
Let's [12]make technology work for eight billion people , not eight billionaires. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/25/too_many_outlooks/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z-pnvWbFpHz7u5rqzY-UwQAAAEo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z-pnvWbFpHz7u5rqzY-UwQAAAEo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z-pnvWbFpHz7u5rqzY-UwQAAAEo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z-pnvWbFpHz7u5rqzY-UwQAAAEo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/24/microsoft_opinion/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/17/universe_today_opinion/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/10/neutrino_opinion/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/18/c_opinion/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/26/ai_hinders_productivity/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z-pnvWbFpHz7u5rqzY-UwQAAAEo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://buttondown.com/justenoughinternet/archive/lets-make-technology-work-for-8-billion-people/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
All infuriate, all are lazy insults to users, and all should have no more place in 2025 than cassette tape data storage.
I disagree. Cassette tape data storage is alive and well and living in the retro computer scene, as it should be.
DoNotReply email messages, however, should be classed as crimes against humanity.
"The swamp" is a feature...
Not a bug...
It's to trap people so a bunch of tech-bro's can make more money...
Microsoft's product focus in recent years suggests they're dragging anyone with skill (or pretence thereof) to work on AI-fying everything.
Meanwhile anyone left t'work down at t'mill to sustain existing product lines is realising they're on a pointless treadmill.
Enshittification
There are plenty of parts of operating systems that seem to not just have a poor usability design, but seem deliberately designed to frustrate the user. In these cases, I am sure the motivation is profit, as usual. Why make it easy to change your default program, when it's defaulting to yours already? This used to be easy, but in New Windows (the new one with more frustrations built in), this isn't profitable.
Search is the same, taking you to paid-for options before the actual result you want. Right now for example I'm trying to load Adobe Reader. The first search result is the full Adobe Acrobat. The second is something else and the third is Adobe Reader. But once I install it, it'll try and sell me the full version. On the way there, it may default to loading a trial awful antivirus.
None of this is for the benefit of the user. OS and Web are so intertwined these days it's hard to see where one ends and the other starts. All that happens is the end user gets frustrated.
Microsoft using their as-yet-unfinished Outlook (New) onto us is just part of the problem. Then there's Teams (Personal) Vs Teams For Work or School. Why? And Microsoft's silly games telling you off for trying to download Chrome rather than use their terrible browser. You may ask why I say it's terrible. Well, it isn't actually terrible. What is terrible is the user experience. The first thing it does is show you a page full of "news". Except it isn't news. It's a mix of clickbait articles and adverts of questionable honesty. They call it a "feed". No thank you, I know you make money off it. It's a time waster. Probably 50% of our Edge users have asked to remove it.
It's all part of the Great Enshittification - the enshittification of everything. Everything is commercialised to the hilt.
Ohhhh Rupert!! Ya wanna hear some technological wankery?
So my electric motorcycle got back home in Florida, after spending 11 months in San Francisco being repaired. That's a tale of wankery and stupidity itself, but that's not the subject of this particular rant, as it's not very technical. Let it be declared that none of my Vs will ever be E again, and I hereby steadfastly resolve to burn dead dinosaurs forevermore.
(It is however, a very nice bike. It's nice to not have to use a clutch after 35 years, and nobody's stupid enough to buy it off of me.)
I'm hoping this will provide at least some amusement to fellow commentards.
I made sure all the charging apps are working on my phone, since one of the rites of passage for owning an EV is installing 25 different such apps, and they delight in failing when you're standing at a station in the heat, so I'm doing this in the airconditioned Chez Crash Cash.
I installed "Shell Recharge" because they bought Volta, and it said "This app is not compatible with rooted mobile devices" which has never been a problem with any other charging app. I can't think of the slightest rationale why they would give a shit.
Challenge accepted. I set Magisk to enforce denylist and added it to that list, and it worked. I was a little disappointed at the ease of my victory.
It said it's been replaced by the "Shell" app and exited. Doh! This is now an all-in-one app that manages their gas loyalty program, in-app payments, digital receipts, as well as finding gas stations and chargers. I'm sure it does all of that perfectly well.
So I tried signing up with that and it sent a confirmation email.
Firefox won't open the link in the email. It says "Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because one of the following protocols (https)[1] isn’t associated with any program or is not allowed in this context." WTAF? Chrome won't open it either, but it doesn't even give an error message. I even start a Windows 10 VM to try Edge. Same result.
Google search AI tells me the oh so helpful advice to clear my cache and cookies, and one link even demands I delete and reinstall Firefox and my profile directory. I'm happy to see search results are their usual quality.
I tried chromium and it said the link wanted to run xdg-open. Finally, some goddamned useful information. The manpage says that "opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application" so I allowed it, then it said it didn’t know the shell-app-america protocol.
Alright... it wants to be opened on the phone, so it can open the app. Fuck me for thinking a confirmation email was a confirmation email.
I pasted it into Brave and it opened the Shell app, which immediately crashed. I restarted it and tried logging in, and it wanted me to do a captcha, which is an immediate uninstall in this house. Oh and just to be clear, it's doing the captcha from the app, not a browser.
I'm not surprised to discover there are several hundreds of 1-star reviews on Google Play. Apparently it doesn't do anything right, so I'm not losing anything by uninstalling it.
I now understand why all the local Shell stations are so seedy, with that "Fallout" vibe to them and the pumps looking like they were last upgraded in 1996. I have seen them on Auto Shenanigans, so I know you're unfortunate enough to have them on your side of the pond as well. If you liked this post, there is a button specifically for that.
[1] and yes it said https and not shell-app-america, doing its small bit to enable all the fuckery.
On my current phone...
... I had to disable every other bundled media-thingy to stop it asking me whether I really wanted to use VLC to play films and music files. Yes, I really really do! Been using it since it firsf came out - phone and PC.
Stop Talking to Each Other...
A very, very good characterization of the Enshittification of the Internet:
[1]Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
As they write (and there is so much more at the link):
[2]‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything .
When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that’s a sign that the environment has changed, and that’s what happened to tech. Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.
...
Think of our ad blockers again. Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.)
[1] https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
[2] https://archive.is/mOlIk#selection-1536.0-1536.1
Usability is a bug, not a feature, in this world
This, a hundred thousands times it is this.
All those eager bodies sitting adding little bits of code to tilt the world towards their view of how things should be, not one of them has the courage (or authority) to stand up and ask why change things which basically worked.