A potted history of Outlook!

Most people will have encountered Microsoft Outlook at some point in their lives. Neil Cummins explores the history of this well known application.

This venerable email package has been with us for over 20 years, during which time constant revisions have attempted to keep pace with a steady stream of criticism from users and observers. Even in today’s webmail and cloud computing era, Outlook thrives as a desktop-based program and a cornerstone of the equally iconic Office suite.
It’s commonly believed that Outlook was launched in 1997, but the package’s genesis can actually be traced back to 1992 and a little-known MS-DOS edition. Superseded by Outlook for Windows 3.1 later that year, early versions were designed to exploit the technical abilities of a new generation of 386 PCs. Features like 16-colour display and networking support were revolutionary in their day, although it was the mid-nineties’ internet explosion that enabled Outlook to achieve its full potential.
In their formative years, emails were no more complicated than text messages, and Outlook had limited functionality for displaying anything other than words. Emails were rendered using Internet Explorer rather than Microsoft Word, which presented considerable limitations in terms of displaying graphical content. Despite this, Outlook was one of the leading email packages of the 1990s, competing against (and ultimately outliving) its glitchy Outlook Express sibling.
With each new version, Outlook has attempted to keep pace with the rapidly-changing pace of technological progress. New versions have frequently introduced features associated with contemporaneous Microsoft packages. For instance, Outlook 2007 was given the Office ‘ribbon’ user interface, or UI. Synchronicity with Microsoft’s Exchange Server enabled remote access to messages at a time when accessing data on the move was pioneering rather than commonplace, and Outlook trumped Outlook Express by providing features like Out Of Office messaging and junk message filters. The introduction of Word as Outlook’s email editor also enabled messages to become considerably more sophisticated than had previously been possible.
Despite such user-friendly flourishes, a great deal of Outlook’s success – and the resentment it attracted – can be attributed to its bundling with Microsoft Office. Launched in 1990, Office quickly became a ubiquitous presence in homes and offices around the world, and Outlook’s presence prevented rival packages from gaining a comparable market share. Although highly-promoted functions like calendar memos and tasks were unremarkable for the time, many people experienced problems and conflicts trying to use alternative email packages when Outlook was pre-installed on their computers.
Unfortunately, Outlook was itself riddled with flaws and glitches, and even a brief summary of all these issues would require many paragraphs. Key issues over the last two decades have included PST folders, which are the files Outlook stores your mail in, that corrupted when they reached a certain size, leading to constant freezing and incompatibility with webmail providers. The range of available add-ins seems impressive at first glance but these were also notorious for causing instabilities. Fortunately, more recent generations of Outlook have addressed this to the point where the latest 2013 version is widely praised for its stability and out-of-the-box functionality.
A glimpse into Outlook’s future suggests a cloud-based succession may be with us already, courtesy of Outlook.com and its 400 million users. This is a webmail alternative to the installed software package with the consequential benefit of avoiding any complaints about bundling. Key features of Outlook.com include the ability to view Office document attachments without needing to have the packages installed, while the close resemblance to its desktop cousin makes it easy for new users to pick up. As the successor to Hotmail and a genuine rival to Gmail and Yahoo Mail, Outlook.com provides further evidence that cloud computing is set to dominate the market in years to come.
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