A large tech company has to offer a free email service to be relevant these days, I suppose, particularly if they delve in search. Build a pretty site, add lots of features, and offer the accounts free. Sure, there will be targeted ads polluting the site to generate some revenue for the company, but I […]

When Microsoft announced that they would build a Mac version of Outlook — their professional Windows email client — for Office 2011, I had some guarded hopes. After all, Encourage had proven to be a buggy mess. Not only would it crash frequently regardless of the Mac I was using, or the OS version, but […]

I have long held a love/hate relationship with Microsoft’s Mac email software. Whereas the previous entrant, an email/contact manager known as Entourage, offered a powerful range of features, it proved endlessly flaky to me in the real world. For one thing, those inevitable lockups and, second, the feeling I was trudging through quicksand whenever I […]

On last week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, I did a segment with Amanda Lefebvre, one of the product people at Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit, to discuss some of the most compelling features of the forthcoming Office 2011 for the Mac. Due out in October, there are two key improvements of note, one […]