I
Ivan Bútora
As has been documented, Microsoft removed the option to encode in Quoted
Printable in Outlook 2002. Does somebody know why this was done? Outlook is
quite a robust program with many uses. One of these is e-mailing. For the
high price of Outlook, I would expect that the user should get many options
and many customizable features (it amazes me that one cannot customize the
head of the original message when quoted in a reply, for example). I would
also expect from Outlook something very basic, and that is the ability to
communicate without line breaks. It is quite ironic that MS removes quoted
printable, but then creates a new option to "remove line breaks" in plain
text messages (!!), when it is Outlook 2002 ITSELF that PUTS line breaks
there in the first place. So for example if I receive a plain text message
in Outlook 2000 sent by Outlook 2002, it will always have line breaks!
The line breaking removal feature also seems to be incompetent, since from
what I've seen it removes also hard line breaks which were made on purpose
by the user by pressing Enter.
Would anybody know what the situation is planned for Outlook 2003?
I would appreciate any information on quoted printable, or other types of
encoding. Also, is there a website where I can let Microsoft know what I do
and do not want to see in the next version of Outlook?
Below are some of my thoughts about how these changes in Microsoft's
software reflect some general trends in Microsoft's thinking...
Thanks,
Ivan Butora
It seems to me that Microsoft's trend is to make software more "simple" and
"slick", whereas really what this means is removing options from users, and
requiring users to go through more steps to get to options (such as the
ridiculous wizard-like box that appears when one wants to view, add, or
change e-mail accounts in Outlook 2002 - thus one always has to click twice,
whereas before it was just once). Microsoft also seems to like to put more
and more options into the category of "advanced", thus discouraging users
that consider themselves "less advanced" to change such settings. Thus
Microsoft expects that the customer is increasingly stupid (to put it
simply), and at the same time Microsoft supports this by adding various
wizards, and unnecessary steps, and hiding various things form the user
(such as .pst files in Windows XP - this is absolutely ridiculous), settings
wrong defaults (such as viewing known file types without extensions). The
overall result is that Microsoft does not encourage the user to be more in
control and more educated, but on the contrary - the company tries to take
more and more control away from the user. It considers the user stupid, and
wants to dictate to the user how he/she should think and work with their
computer. If Microsoft really wanted to be helpful, why not put something in
Outlook that informs the user at the beginning about the differences between
HTML and plain text in a very factual manner, and lets the user choose an
encoding, rather than making HTML default, and many users never even knowing
what the options are.
Sorry for such a long rant, but I'm growing increasingly frustrated with
Microsoft, especially now looking at the development of the next version of
Windows, etc.
Printable in Outlook 2002. Does somebody know why this was done? Outlook is
quite a robust program with many uses. One of these is e-mailing. For the
high price of Outlook, I would expect that the user should get many options
and many customizable features (it amazes me that one cannot customize the
head of the original message when quoted in a reply, for example). I would
also expect from Outlook something very basic, and that is the ability to
communicate without line breaks. It is quite ironic that MS removes quoted
printable, but then creates a new option to "remove line breaks" in plain
text messages (!!), when it is Outlook 2002 ITSELF that PUTS line breaks
there in the first place. So for example if I receive a plain text message
in Outlook 2000 sent by Outlook 2002, it will always have line breaks!
The line breaking removal feature also seems to be incompetent, since from
what I've seen it removes also hard line breaks which were made on purpose
by the user by pressing Enter.
Would anybody know what the situation is planned for Outlook 2003?
I would appreciate any information on quoted printable, or other types of
encoding. Also, is there a website where I can let Microsoft know what I do
and do not want to see in the next version of Outlook?
Below are some of my thoughts about how these changes in Microsoft's
software reflect some general trends in Microsoft's thinking...
Thanks,
Ivan Butora
It seems to me that Microsoft's trend is to make software more "simple" and
"slick", whereas really what this means is removing options from users, and
requiring users to go through more steps to get to options (such as the
ridiculous wizard-like box that appears when one wants to view, add, or
change e-mail accounts in Outlook 2002 - thus one always has to click twice,
whereas before it was just once). Microsoft also seems to like to put more
and more options into the category of "advanced", thus discouraging users
that consider themselves "less advanced" to change such settings. Thus
Microsoft expects that the customer is increasingly stupid (to put it
simply), and at the same time Microsoft supports this by adding various
wizards, and unnecessary steps, and hiding various things form the user
(such as .pst files in Windows XP - this is absolutely ridiculous), settings
wrong defaults (such as viewing known file types without extensions). The
overall result is that Microsoft does not encourage the user to be more in
control and more educated, but on the contrary - the company tries to take
more and more control away from the user. It considers the user stupid, and
wants to dictate to the user how he/she should think and work with their
computer. If Microsoft really wanted to be helpful, why not put something in
Outlook that informs the user at the beginning about the differences between
HTML and plain text in a very factual manner, and lets the user choose an
encoding, rather than making HTML default, and many users never even knowing
what the options are.
Sorry for such a long rant, but I'm growing increasingly frustrated with
Microsoft, especially now looking at the development of the next version of
Windows, etc.