Post: Invasion of the Morons
In helping my mother (who, bless her, isn’t the most tech-savvy person in the world) sort out her e-mail, I’ve discovered a contender for “most moronic software decision” in Microsoft Outlook 2002. I believe this has been rectified in the latest version of Outlook, but that’s really no excuse.
When browsing through one’s e-mail, Outlook offers the opportunity to group your e-mails by any of the fields. The most useful application of this tends to be grouping by sender, or perhaps grouping by which account you used to receive the message. These Outlook manages to handle reasonably well (with a few little niggles, but that’s forgivable). However, one might also conceivably want to group mesages by when you received them, by month, week, or even day. This would make things much nicer. However, Outlook decides to group them by minute.
This results (in this case) in approximately 5,000 message groups, very few of which have more than one item in them. I can only assume that the developers at Microsoft had assumed a braindead state before coding this up.
Oh, and storing all of the user’s mail, calendar information and address book in a single file is a poor design decision, especially as their mail backlog becomes larger and larger. Making this file not recover empty space (thus making it monotonically increasing in size) is just stupid.
Rant over – back I go to Thunderbird.
Aha, the bi-weekly Microsoft rant… 😉
hehe, deep breathes, in, out, in, out … You’re blood pressure must rocket every time someone mentions the ‘M‘ company 😉
Nice Jonty 😀
Of course, Microsoft do produce some shite – SourceSafe for one (it was only recently that I discovered that the ability to concurrently work on the same file was normal… hugs Subversion). We are, rest assured, dumping it for CVS when we get the chance to run an internal trial. Just gotta get Visual Studio 2003 integration and we’re made.