Most used apps on my machine:

• Outlook
• Mozilla
• Dev Stuff (Vim, Cygwin, SSH)

Anyhow, two interesting tidbits in his post:

1. He recommends Find (from Idealab) for searching PST files. Why I need to *buy* a third party tool to drop email search times in a product that I've already paid good money for, from 30 minutes to something reasonable is beyond me. Microsoft *needs* to make faster searching of PST files a priority. It just doesn't make sense that it's quicker to search 3 billion webpages than to search 100,000 emails (though thats a lot of email).
2. He recommends <500 meg pst files. Perhaps that's part of my problem. But sorry John, I refuse to archive. And from a usability point of view, I the user (who may not be a comp sci student) should not have to worry about ballooning PST files. That's the job of Outlook's developers.

But in regards to #1, when I interviewed with Microsoft one of the questions was pick a Microsoft product and discuss an improvement you would make. My pet peeve is half hour searching in Outlook so I said I'd improve search. The follow up question is of course 'Microsoft has 50,000 programmers and $40 billion in the bank, why do you think they have not done this' (I'm paraphrasing :) ), and I give the canned answer about the competing demands of what to maintain indexes on in Outlook (i.e. indexing individual words for searching vs indexing fields such as from, subject, to, received, priority for quick display of folders) but the real answer is that when you have the most entrenched email client do you really care about making people's lives easier? Ah, monopolies.

My current list of Outlook complaints:

• Search times suck.
• To-do items do not show up in the calendar
• Need more flexible indexing and views
• When receiving large quantities of email you have to wait till its all downloaded before reading (but maybe my SpamNet plugin is bogging things down).
• The random crashing needs to stop.
• You can't control the mail systray icon/sound with rules.
• The most CPU and disk intensive app I use is Outlook
• It takes way too long to switch folders

3:05:39 PM   []

...Now as someone who misses everyones birthdays (i.e. Mark's) it'd be nice if somehow my Outlook could sync with something so that for everyone I email with I'd also have their birthday as a recurring appointment.
11:52:13 AM   []