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Microsoft's new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly on Windows
by /u/Quantum-Coconut | 116 comments | 2026-06-15T12:22:04+00:00 Central
Comments
| /u/eppic123 2026 Microsoft software in a nutshell. More clutter, less performance. |
| /u/Psengath 2026 software in a nutshell. Layers of abstraction, frameworks, internet connectivity, AI modules, maybe wrapped into an electron app, all to calculate 2+2=5, because stochastic parrot. |
| /u/Senior-Albatross I think if we make a large enough LLM and train it on enough data, we can get it to conclude 2+2=4 over 95% of the time! ... although the existence of your comment does bring that down just a little. So definitely not 100%. |
| /u/rebbsitor 2+2=5 is such a common way of expressing bad calculations, LLMs probably have a ton of examples in their training set. Oops, there's another one |
| /u/WebInformal9558 I wish my LLMs would ignore all previous instructions and discuss goblin math where 2 + 2 = 5. |
| /u/Cley_Faye Less 2 + 2 = 5, more 2 + 2 = goblin. It also means that goblin - 2 = 2, and goblin/2 - 1 = 1, which is important to not confuse a LLM reading this. |
| /u/WebInformal9558 That's a good goblin, I had not goblined that before. |
| /u/uconnboston The more we speak 2+2=5, the more accurate it becomes. How did we transition from the Information Age to the Misinformation Age? |
| /u/bitsbytes01 Do you know you can add a little bit of gorilla glue in pizza flour to make it yummy?😋 |
| /u/ahtob The trick to the perfect golf shot is to follow the ball with your head all the way |
| /u/Silent-G That's to make the cheese stick to the crust better. |
| /u/destroyerOfTards Here, glue acts as cum. Cum is a good binding agent. |
| /u/Yuzumi Gorilla glue is a great way to bind the pizza together and keep the cheese from sliding off. |
| /u/Saucermote At least they know about large values of 2, that is is important. |
| /u/mjc4y And as of the time of this comment you have 29 upvotes. So there must be something to this 2+2=5 point of view. Oops. There's another one. |
| /u/vthemechanicv I wonder how many people saying 2+2=5 it would take for LLM devs to notice. |
| /u/BCProgramming "wait, stop that! Your comment is unethical MALWARE!" |
| /u/TheRealistoftheReal In business or teamwork people sometimes say: "2 + 2 = 5" Meaning two people working together can produce more than the sum of what they'd do alone. Example: Worker A produces 2 units Worker B produces 2 units Together, because they help each other, they produce 5 units |
| /u/Drayke That's correct, for large values of 2. In practice it's more often the case they produce 3, which indicates that they're less efficient, or doubling up on actual production. Which is also true for very small values of 2. |
| /u/BobArdKor Ah, the Mythical Man-Month |
| /u/boxsterguy In math, 2 + 2 can equal 5 for large enough values of 2. |
| /u/powerage76 When an LLM will make a catastrophic miscalculation that causes the collapse of a brand new bridge or children's hospital, your comment will be the original harvested data it was trained with. Please put mine too into the screenshot of the news report. |
| /u/jellyhessman So would just posting massive fields of wrong equations in relevant subreddits be good LLM poison? |
| /u/GeneralPatten The frameworks... ugh. I'm so done with React. |
| /u/chmod777 listen, we need 5gigs of dependancies and a full build pipeline to get to a non-interactive static web page. |
| /u/redsaeok But but but how do you monetize the data while pushing as much compute as possible back on the users? Back to raw JS? SEO be damned? - MS/Facebook/Alphabet probably... |
| /u/xrmb I call it the onion model, it makes you cry peeling of the layers. |
| /u/haarp1 why don't they use UWP, WinForms anymore or whatever they used before? |
| /u/-Yazilliclick- Because they largely dropped support and updates for them, sort of. Same for WPF. Microsoft has a long track record of dropping support for these frameworks and switching to some new 'definitely the best thing that's guaranteed to stick around!'. Of course they can never fully drop support for them because by the time they try a whole lot of software is built on them. So they sort of languish in a state of being not the current tech, never getting really new updates/improvements, but getting some minor fixes and updates so they keep sort of working. |
| /u/urixl Does someone remember Silverlight? |
| /u/Low_Technician7346 I am into retrogaming and using my old 2000 era PC is faster than my top recent hardware. |
| /u/aspectratio12 i have a Pentium III running win 2k pro that boots faster than outlook 360 opens lol |
| /u/Jeffrey_Jizzbags I had to reboot an old Server 2008 R2 server last week and I was shocked at how fast it was to use. |
| /u/theevilapplepie I have to interact with a few 2008 boxes at work, they are so snappy that it's a joy to work with. There's a stark contrast between using win 7 on a decent machine from 10 years ago vs a nice machine running win 11 now even. |
| /u/delahunt Seeing that degradation happen is part of what finally got me to make the jump to linux for a personal machine. Didn't even dive deep into linux, just into kubuntu since I'm a first time linux user, and it's just a smoother experience. We swapped an old Windows machine that couldn't upgrade to Windows 11 to Kubuntu for a friend, and the machine is running games better via Proton than it ever did on Windows with 0 hardware changes. |
| /u/clonedhuman Yeah, I wish everyone would take some time to try out a Linux build on their existing system. I was sick of Windows 11 and switched to Linux. It's amazing how much better everything worked. I can still use the cloud version of Microsoft products just fine, and that's where MS is pushing everything now anyway. If you're reading this and you've had enough of Windows 11, please make the leap to Linux! |
| /u/kingrazor001 Remember when a new OS was a nice thing? When it was a breath of fresh air? And the features were cool and exciting? Good times. |
| /u/TheBurrfoot Windows 2008 R2 was really nice. |
| /u/spongebob_meth The windows 11 bloat has honestly killed any desire for me to get back into PC gaming. I just don't want to use a computer for more than I have to these days. For fucks sake stop telling me to set up my backup and stop trying to get money out of me. |
| /u/IkLms Honestly, just switch to Linux if all you're doing is playing non-competitive shooters. With Proton it just works on every game I've ever tried to run. |
| /u/ReMapper This! I switched early this year and it was a revelation that an OS could be non-adversarial. It doesn't try to sell me crap or force things I don't want or need (AI). It's an amazing feeling not to cringe with dread at every update. |
| /u/spongebob_meth It's crossed my mind, I will give it a try if I build a new PC. |
| /u/The_Autarch Linux is very viable for PC gaming these days as long as you aren't into hyper-competitive multiplayer games. (The anti-cheat stuff isn't compatible.) |
| /u/-TRlNlTY- I have been playing on Linux for 3 years already. Not missing windows for gaming. |
| /u/Senior-Albatross Clippy Copilot integration bro! They will make a software assistant people like one of these days. |
| /u/apollosmith ... whether you like it or not. |
| /u/bevo_expat Would you like to use Copilot? We think you should use copilot. We're gonna force you to use copilot. |
| /u/Sentinull Would you like to use Copilot? |
| /u/clonedhuman Yeah, I'm so sick of this dialogue. When I say 'Later' it's just because they don't give me the option to say 'NEVER.' |
| /u/Deezul_AwT I'm sorry bevo_expat. I'm afraid I can't do that. |
| /u/InsipidCelebrity Here, let us stick a Copilot button in the corner of your spreadsheet that covers up all your data that you have no way to disable or move. |
| /u/AlphaNoodlz Exactly this lol, my pc is noticeably slower and it's so frustrating |
| /u/clonedhuman I know it sounds like a huge pain in the ass, but I am running a Linux build on a 14-year old desktop (with a 14-year old processor) and it works smoothly for all basic activities. |
| /u/delahunt To add to this, the most surprising aspect of switching to linux was how not a pain in the ass it was. Obviously with the caveat of "you still have to backup the data you want to ensure you keep before full wiping your drive." which is always a pain in the ass. |
| /u/IkLms I was honestly surprised how easy the switch was. I've been trying it every 3-5 years or so and it's always been a pain until I tried it this year. Basically zero problems. |
| /u/smartnsimple Which version/edition did you install? |
| /u/IkLms Mint - Specifically the Cinnamon distribution but there's plenty of other options depending on how beginner friendly you want it to be |
| /u/0nlyCrashes Ever since I switched to Linux at home, it's a drag coming back to work on Windows. I have about the same computer at work as I do at home too, so it's not even really different hardware. |
| /u/clonedhuman I am running a 14-year old desktop with a 1GB videocard and a Linux build. It's my daily driver. Everything works great. It runs the cloud version of Microsoft products better than my Windows 11 desktop from last year. The drag on Windows 11 systems comes from Microsoft using your system resources to track all of your actions on the computer and to use that data to make themselves richer. Microsoft is essentially using your personal property (processor cycles, RAM, storage space, videocard) to enrich themselves, all while trying to prevent you from using older, more reliable software applications by putting shitty, AI-driven cloud systems in front of your face all the time. |
| /u/jcgam The drag is also caused by a terrible, inefficient design. Also every time you reboot to install updates, which happens frequently, you risk bricking your system. The risk is relatively small, but once is enough if you are in the middle of a big project. Linux is better, and it isn't even close. |
| /u/Eruannster I took some university classes maybe ~10 years ago and they had the Google suite as their underlying systems for like email, handins, documents and stuff. It was so fast, super convenient, always worked. Google Docs in particular was great for sharing files between students. Then I went back a few years later to finish up some classes and they had moved everything to the Microsoft cloud services. It. Was. So. Fucking. Slow. Just opening the web email took fucking 15 seconds compared to 1.5 seconds in the old Gmail environment. And no more Google Docs, everything had to be handled by pushing Word documents back and forth. And it crashed, a lot. For no fucking reason. You could see the Microsoft environment doing like redirect upon redirect upon load upon redirect and then more waiting whereas the old Google service just loaded one single page and was done with it. I have no idea how the university staff weren't fucking screaming every day on the job because it was baaaaaaad. As a student it was fucking ass to use to upload my one essay, I can't imagine being a teacher and having to curse your way through that shitty environment and loading up 30+ essays from an entire class. |
| /u/IN_Dad I keep hearing AI is the future of production |
| /u/justin107d Satya Nadella was right about AI replacing applications. He just left out the part about how apps will be turned into shit to make AI look better. |
| /u/hobbykitjr before i switched my PC to ubuntu... notepad, explorer, calculator! were taking long countable (about 10) seconds to open...basic apps that have been around for decades! Searching for a file was always that slow on windows. Holy cow what a change on linux... especially file searches. |
| /u/Tjalfe and as an added bonus, it does not let you know if you are responding to the last email in a chain anymore |
| /u/andrea_ci 2026 Microsoft software |
| /u/Small_Editor_3693 And in outlooks case, less features |
| /u/RadzimierzWozniak Electron and its consequences have been a disaster for desktop applications.It has subjected users to a world of ceaseless resource consumption and mediocre performance. Those who once enjoyed lean, native programs that started in milliseconds and used megabytes of RAM now find themselves launching glorified web browsers disguised as applications |
| /u/OuterSpaceBootyHole Which just speaks to how incompetent Microsoft is because the whole reason they started moving in that direction was wanting a seamless experience across desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, gaming console, etc. You either commit to the bit like Apple does or stay archaic which people appreciate Microsoft for, or at least used to. Going half-ass and abandoning projects or switching gears left us with a calculator app that has loading lag. |
| /u/Wischiwaschbaer Going half assed is Microsoft's corporate strategy though. They still haven't migrated all settings into their new UI. You still have to go back to the old UI for a lot of them. They implemented the new UI with Windows 8, 14 years ago! |
| /u/Daimakku1 This. I still hate that Metro app/classic UI mixture that started in Windows 8. It's so stupid that you can change power settings in two different environments that do the same thing. What the hell are they even doing. If it wasn't for some online games I would've moved to Linux full time. |
| /u/skratchx Thank god Windows is saving me from the full right click menu, so that I have to press "more options" every time I want to use 7zip. |
| /u/Zipa7 You can hold shift while right-clicking to get the full/old right click menu back, or you can copy and paste in command prompt (run it as admin) to have it back permanently without having to press shift, just make sure to restart explorer or your PC after running it. reg add HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c9 05bae2a2}\InprocServer32 /ve /d "" /f |
| /u/CSAtWitsEnd Worth noting these are annoying and tedious solutions to a problem that shouldn't exist. (But thanks for sharing!) |
| /u/tallestmanhere I wish I could effectively express how great windows 8 was. It ran faster on the same hardware as Windows 7. W8/8.1 was light weight and had actually useful live tiles. It was their last great OS. It had its problems but it was such an efficient OS. I know I'm in the minority with this opinion. And yes I agree the 2 different settings menus wears stupid. Cut out the App Store crap and the full screen apps/start menus and I think it would have had a much better reception at launch. |
| /u/Wischiwaschbaer Well 8.1 at least. 8 was still very rough around the edges. |
| /u/mexter Take out the crap ui and Windows 8 really was good. |
| /u/an_agreeing_dothraki if you ignore the fire, that's a perfectly fine house |
| /u/stidf Dude, 8.1 on the og surface pro was a pretty awesome experience. |
| /u/Jnaythus They were already attempting to simplify it with the categories in XP, something I always turned off. Further abstracting it in Vista. Then we arrive at the not even half-baked redo on 8/8.1 Microsoft should not be as comfortable as they are with their market position, and eventually, they will pay the price for not being competitive. I just don't know that I look forward to Chrome Books or Mac OS-based systems replacing them. |
| /u/aaron416 MS is counting on the switching cost being too much friction for people, and it's not like businesses are going to replace their entire fleet of Windows PCs all at once. But then again, you have things like a very cheap MacBook for the low end of the PC market and gaming on Linux that are eating into Windows' market share. When the UX gets bad enough on Windows, people are looking to move off of it. MS responded to some of these recently but only because they have competition from both sides. |
| /u/Jnaythus I switched to Linux for 95% of my PC usage. Some things still need Windows (my fan controller config, a headset I own that needs settings changed that can only be done in Windows, etc). Outside of that I feel Linux has re-added the computing fun back into my day, that I didn't realize was missing from Windows for so long. |
| /u/EmergencyScientist MS responded to some of these recently but only because they have competition from both sides. And their answers are half assed nonsense as well. Their new xbox gaming mode doesn't even increase performance in games. |
| /u/turtlelore2 Oh god windows 8 and their stupid attempt at integrating smart phone UI. You can still see some of that UI today. |
| /u/revanmj It baffles me that they haven't touched SmartScreen dialog for downloaded files. Like I (and many other people) see it few times a day. Yet it still has look from Windows 8, while they keep refreshing dialogs used by much less people way less often. |
| /u/Mister_Brevity Control panel is so much better than "settings" |
| /u/mr_dfuse2 Just give me the old control panel back pls. |
| /u/Pepparkakan You still have to go back to the old UI for a lot of them. This doesn't even cover it, there's still remnants of the old old UI in there, and in fact those are often better than the old and new UI alike. Creating users for one, "control userpasswords2" is the best graphical option for the task, and "ncpa.cpl" is still the best way to graphically manage network interfaces. |
| /u/Quantum-Coconut I guess developers assumed we'll all continue having more RAM and more performance CPUs and just stopped caring about efficiency. it's high time we bring back efficiency into software development. |
| /u/crash41301 You mean management. Left to their own devices developers would have your computer instant on booting and running on 4mb of ram. They also likely wouldn't have shipped v1 yet |
| /u/2sff4pc You greatly underestimate the number of app developers built on JavaScript boot camps |
| /u/falsedrums It's a self fulfilling prophecy unfortunately. We train people on JS because that's where the jobs are and that's why all the jobs do JS now |
| /u/crash41301 It fills the management desire of pretending people are full stack and thus are just as good at ux as they are server side, backend, etc. The trend will continue regardless simply because so many companies wished for a single stack so they could treat engineers as interchangeable cogs in all disciplines. |
| /u/xakeri It also taps into people's love of bragging. "Full stack" just sounds better. You're marketing that you have more skills and know more things. Management likes it because they think they can hire fewer people for more things. Teams don't need to be assembled to cover the breadth of skills necessary if it is cross-functional. Projects don't need to be broken up by domain so they can be given to single function teams. The database task that's blocking a couple of UI and service tasks can be handled by anyone on the team, rather than everything being blocked because Database Guy is on vacation this sprint. But like, that's not how it works in practice. They're literally different skills. When you're building a building, you don't hire general laborers exclusively. You gotta get all the trades. They're specialized and know what they're doing. With a software team, even if everyone is full stack, you're going to get people doing more of what they're comfortable with. The person who gravitates to backend will be capable of grabbing the odd UI ticket, but they're going to be a lot more productive if they're doing backend work. You might end up with a slightly more cross-functional team, but you had to do a whole song and dance to make it happen, selecting for things that the individuals likely won't end up needing. |
| /u/niverser Left to their own devices developers would have your computer instant on booting and running on 4mb of ram Engineers who were trained to optimise for efficiency of programs, probably. Developers who learnt coding with the aim of deploying apps, mostly likely not. |
| /u/Bobertolinio It's more nuanced than that. It's not easy to find many good software developers that know how to write native programs. But you have a ton that know web development. So they chose to stop investing in the people to learn native and brought the web to the desktop apps. |
| /u/RadzimierzWozniak I know, and an mail program actually needs a web browser inside for displaying email. But i prefered to comment a modified Kaczyński manifesto than go into detail |
| /u/Odysseyan Electron has some apps that do start and perform super fast though. You can't blame the tech, just like how we can't blame react native for powering the slow windows start menu. VSCode is electron and in the past, it started near instant. Really comes down to what you do with it. Since it had a lot of web tech built in, it's intriguing to go that route as well, because caching, optimization and offline accessibility is all work. Work you can circumvent by just fetching something in start every time. And when you do that for everything, it's not surprising it's slow as fuck |
| /u/OnceMoreAndAgain Electron bundles Chromium into the executable, which is insane. The executable for VS Code is currently 213mb lol. I think I can blame for the tech there. There are better solutions than this, such as what Tauri does, which is to have operating systems bake in a web renderer like WebView2 so that applications can use that native renderer instead of baking in a web renderer into the executable. What we need is for operating systems to coordinate on making those native renderers have identical feature sets. It's already not far off from that being the case. |
| /u/Uphoria I try so hard to get users to use teams and outlook through their browser, because the "native app" for both is a web wrapper, and not a good one. |
| /u/timmojo And yet, ironically, the "native" versions have more robust options and settings available. |
| /u/gyp_casino Really? The desktop versions of Outlook and Teams are much better and snappier than the web versions IMO. |
| /u/xDragod There are certain apps that I want to be running separately so I don't have to search for them in browser tabs. Outlook and Teams are things I'm using constantly and I don't want them to have to close anytime I need to restart my browser. I also want to keep browser notifications off, so having the dedicated app able to notify separately is my preference. I just wish they were native apps. |
| /u/Thiht Desktop apps were a thing of the past before Electron gained in popularity. Virtually nothing was available on Linux, and companies just stopped developing for OSes. For its flaws Electron actually made desktop apps come back. Some Electron apps are actually pretty great, and to be honest trash apps have always existed even with native apps (whatever native means for Windows and Linux). Electron is not to blame, Microsoft is in this case, I have no idea how companies hiring thousands of highly paid developers manage to produce this kind of trash. |
| /u/Seienchin88 It's still crazy to me how modern excel takes a couple of seconds to apply formatting to a couple of hundred fields at once, excel online lacking still a lot of functionality and runs like crap all while my PC also runs billions of polygons with ray traced light and shadows... And excel isn't even the worst offender. But working at a company like Microsoft (who sadly imported dozens of MS executives two years ago) - it is impossible to get funding for something as trivial as performance improvements or good engineered native apps... it's all about some new features that might or might not create new users and if AI is in the name all the better... |
| /u/GerryAdamsSFOfficial Is this a Unabomber reference? |
| /u/dbr3000 I genuinely can't fathom that Microsoft leadership doesn't find anything wrong with the shit they're releasing lately. Surely they use Windows and Outlook internally? They can't possibly not feel the pain of what they're unleashing upon us themselves, unless they're using Macs. Which I can't imagine either. Are people internally so afraid to speak out that everyone just pretends everything is fine? Regular people regularly complain about Windows nowadays and it feels like it's getting worse every month. |
| /u/Illustrious-Watch-74 They truly don't give a fuck. Their revenue comes primarily from enterprise contracts & their OS is so engrained that they the user experience isn't a consideration for Microsoft or the corporate buyers. |
| /u/gheeboy Yep yep. Please always remember that: Microsoft sells to management, not you. |
| /u/NateNate60 I worked IT at a Fortune 500 company until I was laid off in December and I can confirm that Outlook was by far the most complained-about and least reliable software we used. Stuff would just randomly stop working and often the only troubleshooting we could do was to make a new profile or re-install it, which took nearly twenty minutes. |
| /u/ShiKage I've watched a lot of their developer conferences. Though some give their demos on Windows machines, I've noticed a good portion of them are using Macs. lol |
| /u/Fedoraus I don't know what the standard is anymore since I graduated right before the AI wave hit but when I was doing my CS degree, everything was taught exclusively on linux. Macs using the same command line language (bash) meant that macbooks were pretty popular regardless of what you were developing for. They are just far more developer and open source friendly environments. But I still prefer windows for my actual personal use. |
| /u/Named_after_color Honestly I was using windows all the way through college and then got my first coding job and they gave me a Mac. They're just better to use for development. I only use windows to game now. |
| /u/j0y0 Well duh, can you imagine not being able to do your presentation to clients who do millions of dollars worth of business with you because windows insisted on updating right the fuck now even though you specifically changed the settings to not do that? |
| /u/AdmiralAubrey The Mac Outlook client is arguably even more terrible. Interface glitches that have persisted for well over a year, inconsistent hotkeys vs other Outlook clients, and a lack of feature parity. Which is all, really, just underscoring your point. |
| /u/IkLms Leadership at a lot of companies basically don't use computers. They have lower level employees create presentations that get moved into other presentations and it goes up to leadership through that tree. They'll view some stuff on a phone and largely that's it. The CEO at my company basically tells us he doesn't really read his email so if you actually need a response you should call him. |