Outlook.com fails to stimulate

August 2012 saw the debut of Microsoft's OUTLOOK.COM, a new webmail tool. It's destined to replace HotMail, and supposed to be their whack at the future of email.

HotMail and Yahoo have become so drenched with spam and hack attacks, I regularly recommend against using those sites to my customers. So what has Outlook.com done to help stop these personal invasions, and what does it offer that improves on any other webmail service, like GMail?

Except for the sign-up process, which involves a couple of extra security steps compared to HotMail, I see absolutely no improvement in security. If there is, please, someone tell me. So don't bother switching to feel more secure that your Contacts list isn't going to be stolen.

Microsoft is playing up the new interface: cleaner, they say. Right, like Google Chrome's interface is cleaner. All they've done is manage to hide most of the previously easily-accessible icons, and changed those icons to the currently-popular one-dimensional, flat-looking, boringly-coloured, Windows 8-type icons. This "minimalist" approach does nothing to help existing or new users. In fact, it makes it that much more difficult for the average computer user to figure out what the hell to do next.

My big complaint with GMail has always been their minimalist interface, and they continue to "improve" this by hiding more and more of the available options. Kind of like car stereos: they used to have buttons for everything. With the advent of the digital age, all the functionality is hidden under various sequences of key-presses. Just changing the clock on my car stereo usually means I have to pull out the damned manual. Why is everyone under the impressions that less is better? It's not: obvious is better. But hiding the interface is all the trend these days, a trend being mindlessly bought into by creators caught in a rut. Microsoft lost the ability to be original years ago in most things, and Outlook.com reflects only some designers' idea of cool.

More importantly, there's very little new at all beside the interface. Yes, it's going to be Facebook-connected. Big friggin' deal. They've integrated the mail with Office Web Apps and SkyDrive. Big friggin' deal. I for one will never use those services, because they make me feel totally NOT in control of my stuff. Mark my words: "cloud" computing... which is simply a developer term for web-based networking... is going to fail just like "slim" PCs did, and every other attempt to make money from us by taking control away from us. The only thing that makes sense about the cloud is providing the (free) ability to synchronize the data on all your devices automatically. So my contacts list on my phone is the same as the one on my computer, that type of thing.

Where's the help for users in Outlook.com? Where's the tool for uploading images easily; resizing those images on the fly, remembering a specific folder on your PC so you don't have to dig through all your files everytime; where's the visually appealing display of thumbnails so you can grab a photo by it's look and not by its filename? There are millions of users out there who just don't know how to do this kind of stuff, and Microsoft had a huge opportunity to make that painful process a friendly one. Didn't even occur to them.

Where's the easy-to-create sub-folder setup, for sorting? Hidden, and not easy. Where's the helpful wizard to guide you through determining which emails should go where? Where's the tool that scans your emails and makes suggestions for sorting and archiving? Where's the pop-up that says "I see you used the word attachment in your message... did you want to add an attachment before sending"?

Where's the anti-keylogger tool to prevent 'bots from signing in and stealing your Contacts, then changing your password? I could go on, and I will later.