Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Joel on Software - [Outlook and Lookout]

Joel on Software - [Outlook and Lookout] "Could Microsoft have possibly bought Lookout just to shut them down? Even at my most paranoid, I can't for the life of me figure out why Microsoft wants searching in Outlook to be worthless. Maybe just Hanlon's Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Update: They figured it out on the discussion group. Lookout is using an open-source component for searching, which Microsoft can't redistribute. The only part of Lookout that Microsoft allegedly cares about, the search engine, is released under the Apache license. The only part of Lookout which Microsoft can use is the Outlook integration, and they don't seem to care about that. Methinks this is one of those "HR Acquisitions," wherein Microsoft buys a company for a few bucks because it's the only way to hire someone they want."

4 comments:

Stanley said...

I reaaly don´t know why MS took a tool like Lookout off the market, it was so great! First it was no problem to work with it further, but nowadays it is impossible... a lot of compability problems! The only tool, which can keep up with Lookout is, in my opionion, Lookeen! (www.lookeen.net) What do you think?

pbokelly said...

I use Windows Search for this -- works great for me, especially in Windows 7

Stan said...

Ok... I haven´t Windows 7, but in Vista I don´t like the WDS very much, it was a little bit slow and needed a lot of resources on my pc

pbokelly said...

Works much better in Windows 7, in my experience