Re: [Evolution] Advice

[troy hakala <troy recipezaar com>]

You're right that a separate newsreader that is solely focused on being 
a newsreader is ultimately better, especially for power users. But the 
reason Outlook customers wanted a newsreader integrated into Outlook is 
mostly because corporations don't want to install 2 applications to get 
the functionality they need. It's easy for an end-user to just install 
both apps, but for an IT dept in a large corporation, rolling out 2 apps 
to 5000 or 10000+ desktops (overnight or over a weekend to boot!) is 
more than twice the amount of work of deploying one app (and the fact 
that OE & Outlook had loads of interoperability problems didn't help). 
And specifically about Outlook & OE, because both are mail clients, 
users were very confused about which to use for mail and which to use 
for news.... the lousy naming of the 2 products didn't help either. So 
Outlook lost out on big contracts with corporations who went with OE 
(for $0/copy) instead of Outlook for everything (since OE has them 
integrated).

And, believe it or not, there are lots of corporations who use NNTP for 
internal discussions (why? cuz it works... imagine that!;). So many 
corporations have real use for a newsreader. This is what always shocked 
the Outlook team.... most Outlookers believe that NNTP is for Britney 
Spears fan clubs and porn, so simply refused to believe the IT dept at 
companies like Ford Motor Company that NNTP really is important to them, 
no matter how loud Ford screamed at them. And most Outlook users didn't 
live with Outlook open all day (the way we have our mail client open all 
day long) but instead, launched it, read & send mail, closed it, repeat. 
So having to do that with 2 different apps to get their mail and then 
their news was just dumb and irritating. Another reason MS never put a 
newsreader in Outlook was because they wanted to push Exchange Server's 
Public Folders instead of NNTP so that corps would buy Exchange Server 
instead of an NNTP server that MS didn't make.

I'm not encouraging the Evolution team to build a newsreader either..... 
but they should be at least work well together and the Evolution team 
should understand why or why not they would want to do it. Outlook & OE 
don't work together at all. For example, you can't drag a message from 
an OE newsgroup into Outlook's folders. And the fact that Outlook & OE 
have a slightly different UI for doing very similar things doesn't make 
it easy on the user. For example, in OE you can view news in a threaded 
view, but not in Outlook (another big request from users for Outlook). 
If Evolution and Pan or any good newsreader could be integrated into the 
same UI, it'd be a surprisingly big plus for Evolution, i think.

Another thing that I mentioned to another person who replied was the 
Outlook store. Very quickly, the Outlook database ("store" as I call it) 
is very, very, very poor. it's slow, gets slower as it grows, is not 
multi-user and is very unstable. MS has tried and tried to get rid of it 
and replace it with a better store, from a SQL db to a mini version of 
the Exchange Server store. Both failed, so Outlook will be stuck with 
this terrible store for the foreseeable future. And customers know and 
understand why Outlook's store suck so bad. If Evolution had a fast, 
reliable, 3rd-party-accessible and a non-proprietary store, a surprising 
number of corporations would be very interested.

Another thing that comes to mind is the poor version of Schedule+ that 
Outlook had. Outlook, to this day, has not yet caught up with the 
features that Schedule+ had years ago. Customers constantly complained 
about this feature or that feature that S+ had that Outlook doesn't.

One pretty brilliant thing that Outlook does that I haven't seen any 
other product do has to do with HTML vs plain text mail. Mozilla, for 
example, asks me every time i send if i wanna send HTML or plain text. 
Outlook has simple but smart logic: if the message I'm replying to came 
in as HTML, my reply is HTML. That works very well.  Another 
super-useful Outlook thing is that it does "morphing" of items... so I 
can drag an email message to the calendar to create an appointment item 
(or any folder to create that item type) with the text of the email in 
the appointment text field. I wished Outlook could go back the other way 
too.

Some suggestions for Evolution:
1. make reminders good, not dumb like Outlook's reminders. a HUGELY 
requested reminder feature is to have reminders fire when Outlook is not 
running.
2. Outlook Bar is good for novice users, Folder List is good for power 
users. But neither is good for most users. Do something good there.
3. Outlook is getting better at syncing from the server for laptop 
users, but it still sucks. Easy & transparent offline use is a VERY 
important feature to users!
4. Performance, performance, performance. 40MB of RAM to run an email 
client is no good.
5. Client & server-side rules are BIG! This should be really easy to 
configure and if they can work on the server (e.g., edit Procmail rules 
from the client), even better.
6. Solve Outlook's brain-dead virus attachment "feature". :)

Ultimately, Outlook as a product is a miserable failure. But it did very 
well in the marketplace because (1) it was in the box with Office, (2) 
corps who deployed Exchange Server had no choice but to use it and (3) 
3rd party companies saw it as a platform to sell their add-on products 
so they helped market it. But it's well-understood in MS that Outlook by 
itself would not have sold a single copy. People inside MS hate to use 
it too. In fact, the total number of copies of standalone Outlook ever 
sold is measured in the thousands (very poor for a MS product).

Anyway, I'm rambling and I can't really recite every piece of info I 
learned in an email message right now. But if there are specific 
questions I'd be happy to answer them, like why Outlook did this or 
didn't do this, what UI features of Outlook didn't work well at all 
versus which ones were very good, what people want to do with Outlook, 
why the Journal feature in Outlook is despised, etc.

David Fallon wrote:

> Speaking only for myself as an end user, I'd love to hear what feedback MS
> was getting about outlook, both good and bad, and what your thoughts are on
> how it succeeded and failed... For example, the integrated news reader is a
> very curious thing - I've always found that the separate news readers that
> focused on the task were always much better than the built in ones (ala
> netscape/outlook express) - Pan, for example, is an amazing newsreader, and
> it seems fairly silly for the evolution people to build that into
> evolution - although with Bonobo, they might not have to. Please, though,
> share your experiences with the list... ;) At the very worst, we'll all
> write you off as a crazy microserf, and ignore you, but you'll feel better
> for the effort.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: troy hakala <troy recipezaar com>
> To: <evolution helixcode com>
> Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2001 2:42 PM
> Subject: [Evolution] Advice
>
>
> > Hi, I'm pretty excited about Evolution and wanted to do what I can to
> > help it become a huge success....
> >
> > I used to be a Program Manager on Outlook at Microsoft (please, don't
> > throw stones). Since Evolution is trying to improve upon what Outlook is
> > and I'd love to see a product that is what Outlook could have been, I'd
> > be more than happy to share my knowledge about what we learned in
> > Outlook from users, both end-users & corporate users. Hopefully, this
> > info can help the development and prioritization of Evolution.
> >
> > For instance, there's features that users constantly asked for but the
> > Outlook group constantly ignored (Microsofties tend to believe they're
> > geniuses and don't believe customers really know what they want) -- for
> > example, an integrated newsreader was always a top request that
> > Outlookers didn't feel like building ("NNTP is dead" was the typical
> > answer;). And there's things that Outlook tried to do but failed
> > miserably at -- performance, reminders, timezone-handling, etc. And....
> > there's some things that Outlook actually did right -- the Outlook bar,
> > for example.
> >
> > Anyway, if anyone's interested, I'd be happy to share what I learned
> > from my Outlook days -- hopefully some good will come out of the time I
> > endured there :). Not intended to dictate, but give some insight so that
> > a lot of work isn't put into areas that most users don't necessarily
> > need/want.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> >
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