Is it time to put Outlook in the trash?

Last year Microsoft released Office 2007, which included a new version of Outlook that performs significantly worse than its predecessor. ?After upgrading to 2007 it?s just been insanely slow,? said one user who contacted me. ?I can barely write an email, Outlook will hang while I type.? There were several problems, mainly to do with Microsoft?s latest attempt at desktop search and its interaction with large mailboxes. A couple of weeks ago Microsoft released a patch to fix these issues; it improves matters considerably, but Outlook 2007 is still less snappy than its predecessor, and still tends to corrupt its offline store if you shut down your PC before it is fully indexed.

The context of these Outlook problems is Microsoft?s ongoing battle with Google for market share and mind share. There are a number of ironies here. Why is full-text search built into Outlook 2007? Surely the popularity of Google?s Desktop Search was a factor here, with Microsoft keen to wean users away from its competitor?s add-on. Google may have inspired the very feature that caused Outlook 2007 to choke.