Blinkered…

I’m listening to a podcast at the moment (which I won’t mention as week by week it is going down in quality very rapidly) and one of the presenters has just commented that he is surprised how Outlook (the desktop client) has become so entrenched in enterprise.

He makes a valid point, but I feel you have to take a step back. Outlook may be getting a little long in the tooth now, but it provided such a breath of fresh air to companies moving from the clunky Lotus Notes that it really was a genuine step up for many purposes. The document repository functionality wasn’t there (in my experience), but grudgingly I can accept SharePoint offers something similar.

I’m fairly fond of Outlook on the desktop, but my move into Microsoft cloud services and Windows 8 has seen me use it mainly for work rather than leisure nowadays. Times are changing, but for the enterprise time moves more slowly and often in an alternate direction.

As an aside, I was also reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague a couple of years ago:

“I remember using the beta versions of Outlook and the initial versions which were free before they folded it into the Office SKU” I remarked.

“Outlook has never been free” he replied.

Okay…..

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