Switching to MS Office Outlook

Contact management and calendaring are two of the most fundamental things people do with information appliances. These are so core that I think they lay at the center of working with an information appliance.

Over the past years we see how there have been attempts to usurp the formidable status of the office suite – especially that of the most dominant one (MS Office) – via the web browser, as a sort of vehicle-of-entry into the space where the user functions and conducts activity.

With this development – which has not really succeeded completely – the web browser becomes something like the “main console” that a person works with and operates from. All other things, like document editing, contact management, e-mail, calendaring, etc. occurs through the browswer.

There are huge battles being fought out in this space, in competing for “the desktop” – the core space out of which people function and operate with information appliances.

This past week I installed the latest version of Microsoft Office and decided to give Outlook 2013 a go. I was not overly impressed with the 2010 version and it always seemed to run very slowly. But the 2013 version is different. It is faster, and there have been changes with everything. I’m not going to get into a review of it here, but suffice to say its a very professional, highly-polished app with a lot of features and is very stable. There are also some 3rd-party addons such as gSyncit which is amazing and WebDAV Collaborator.

I’m beginning to really like it but I worry about getting hooked on Outlook 2013 and almost feel guilty about it. I checked the site for Libre Office and, yes, its true that they do not have any app that is similar to Outlook.

This really makes me wonder what is going on. Something is going on. I wonder how it can not be seen by the Open Source community behind Libre Office and other suites that contact management and calendaring are at the core of everything. They are not auxilliary things. Perhaps it is due to inherited paradigms that those responsible for development just don’t see this picture for some reason?

If I start investing time, energy, and resources into relying on Outlook for my contact management, calendaring, and communication it seems like there will be no return. Certainly Microsoft will not want me to return.

I see contact management, calendaring, and communication as so vital that I’m not willing to take any risk with apps that are potentially not fully developed and supported, or which don’t even exist because their importance hasn’t yet been recognized. As it stands, it seems like the model of a for-profit company that makes such software is the best one because it is presently the strongest by far.