Can we all stop using Outlook please?
Let’s discuss the elephant in the corporate inbox, shall we? Microsoft Outlook, that delightfully frustrating piece of software that turns the simple act of sending an email into a formatting adventure worthy of a fantasy novel.
Picture this: You carefully craft an email, perhaps even dare to copy and paste some text from another source, and Outlook responds by turning your message into what appears to be encrypted hieroglyphics when viewed by anyone not blessed with the sacred Microsoft ecosystem. It’s rather like playing Chinese whispers, except instead of people distorting the message, it’s Outlook helpfully adding its own special blend of proprietary formatting sauce to everything it touches.
What makes this particularly charming is Microsoft’s steadfast commitment to doing things their own way, standards be damned. While the rest of the email world plays nicely together, Outlook stands proudly alone, like that one colleague who insists on using Comic Sans in professional correspondence. It’s not just that Outlook is different; it’s that it’s different in the most unnecessarily complicated way possible.
The true masterpiece of this situation is that Microsoft has managed to make their email client less compatible with other email clients in 2025 than most email clients were with each other in 1994. It’s rather like developing a new type of pen that only writes on special Microsoft paper - brilliant for business lock-in, absolutely rubbish for actually getting things done.
One might suggest that using Outlook is a bit like choosing to communicate via carrier pigeon in the age of smartphones - charmingly anachronistic, unnecessarily complicated, and almost certainly going to result in your message arriving in a form somewhat different from what you intended. But at least with carrier pigeons, you could blame the bird.
[2025-02-25 Tue 11:34] Bruce Tulloch