Outlook Is Dead Long Live Outlook

Hello all I have been writing about pretty heavy stuff lately such as Migration, CSR, Disease and more recently Suicide. On the latter while it did not come easy I must say I have received a lot of off line and online comments so thank you. I thought today I would lighten up a bit and while at first I was not quite sure what to write about it somewhat imposed itself to me as a self-evidence.

You see I write (he thinks he is James Joyce now!!) when I run (he is an Ironman too) a 10K or 15K (he is an ultra-marathoner on top of that) provides me more than often the backbone of an article and sometimes it takes shape even before I have ended up putting one foot after the other. In short when my mind wanders through the Irish landscape I breathe with imaginary paragraphs, I burn potential introductions and I eat many words and various energetic metaphors which ultimately I will have to put together before the feeling of satisfaction fades off.

When I finally recover it is the best time to capture my thoughts and my tool of choice is my beloved Outlook. God I love the draft function, what would I do without it I don’t even remember how life was before I suppose if I push myself I think I communicated via an old framework from a company doing something international with their machines. How boring and unsexy it was!!! .

Obviously today is different and at the risk of giving my age away I am old enough to remember life without email I got my first mailbox around 1995 which I was told was coinciding with the release of a famous interface from a company based in Seattle. I remember clearly that I waited with anticipation, fear and fascination and as soon as I saw ``her`` I was hooked Up. ``She`` has been with me ever since.

In my own opinion this was a true revolution, a mountain of disruption, a defining moment which to date no matter what technology gurus may say has rarely been rivalled since. I see your smile you may even say I am a dinosaur and I know it is VERY fashionable to despise mail, I even read that a large French company trumpeted 2 years ago that they were getting rid of it in order to improve productivity and engagement we have not heard from them since.

The facts are that mail is still representing 70 % more or less of our digital engagement versus the web, while some say mails are a nuisance a large part of Tech Companies customers say they still prefer tech support by mail rather than phone or social media (to be honest big improvements on the latter in the last 18 months) and this survey was only done very recently.

So why our bespoke mailbox subject to so much hatred, is it because it has legitimacy or because it has authority or is it because it is still seen as the channel of choice in terms of communication in any company? Have you ever received an award, a promotion or an official thank you via social media or instant message I bet you did not and if you did it probably had not had the same impact.

Almost poetically I think our inbox is reflecting our rhythm of life, on any day you may receive a newsletter, a request for collaboration, a thank you or an invitation, on any day you will receive mails that will cover a small, medium or large audience and the best thing is that you can accordingly choose when and how to tailor your reply. The web cannot really do this, for starter more than once it is there for everybody to see, how many times people have been embarrassed by tweets or other posts they wished they did not craft so hastily.

Let’s be practical what other tool really allows you to customise, archive, draft or even store I agree they may not all be called outlook but they are probably a variant of the same principle. Interestingly enough what are Facebook, LinkedIn, Aboutme.com and other social media giants doing when you don’t show up on their platform.

Guess what? Their policy is to send you a reminder via…. email, now allow me to anticipate by telling you that I know that if you are a millennial you will call this a spam myself I call it a letter of attention and anyway my dear Outlook would tell me if it was Junk.

Now I have been very loyal to my mailbox for the last 20 years but today I want to come clean. I have had other mailboxes in my life, I know it is maybe unsettling or even upsetting but it is time for me to come out and say I had a relation with Hotmail for the last 10 years, if you are shocked I would like to say I am not ashamed and that I am even planning to pursue the relation under her new name.

Just hear me out, I am pretty sure some of you too have had different mailboxes and I dare challenging any technology lovers telling me they are not being smitten by the almost tangible human feeling of the name outlook reinforced by the fact that the product sits in a suite called Exchange.

SOME SAY OULOOK IS DEAD I SAY LONGLIVE OUTLOOK*

*In the Cloud

PS: you can send me a mail @ pascaldd@outlook.ie

Photo credit: MICROSOFT