Regarding Office, fear not! Microsoft is working hard to remove functionality from the Windows and Mac desktop apps, so soon we’ll have feature parity! See: “New Outlook”.
They’ve been pushing this shit for years already, nobody wants it, and they’re forcing it next year despite still not fixing shared calendars (among other things). New Outlook is basically just the web app in a wrapper.
I mean, cool. Works for me. As soon as there is feature parity between their web app and their native app I no longer have a problem working with Office out of Windows. Not that I want to use Office in the first place, it’s just not my choice.
But right now I need to push a button that doesn’t exist on Linux, so I have to do it on Windows and that determines what I boot, which is the same situation from anybody who hates Adobe but has to use their software suite as well.
I must be nobody, because I like the new Mac outlook. Granted it’s because I like the option to pin emails in top and I don’t recall any missing feature. Why the hate?
Granted I am used to the web version from the time I used Linux at work. The windows version seemed much worse in comparison
Personally I’m a fairly basic user, so for me it’s “fine”. But I also work in IT so I’m aware of some the problems preventing wide adoption across the org.
Shared calendars and delegation still don’t work correctly. It’s a dealbreaker for a lot of the admin assistants, who are generally the most advanced users.
On the Windows side, PST support is basically gone. Microsoft will claim they support PSTs, but their idea of “support” is to use old Outlook to manually copy your PSTs into server-side folders. That would be bad enough even if it were reliable, and in practice it would take eternity for some users to migrate all their stuff. We have nearly unlimited storage in O365 but it’s still a pain.
The only things I actually like about new Outlook are a couple UX changes that would have easily been applied to old Outlook if MS still gave a shit. Instead, old Outlook has been nearly frozen in time since…2016? Maybe 2019?