What are the prevailing trends in how people are using e-mail and Outlook? In the past 10 years, we've seen e-mail traffic increase tenfold. It's an interesting debate on whether this is plateauing or not. Forrester Research expects it to continue to grow. But I've also had conversations with companies trying to get face-to-face interaction back into their workdays. They'll institute policies like "No e-mail Fridays" to encourage employees to call each other or go over to each other's desks and talk.
Personally, I do think e-mail is continuing to grow, which is why we have a pretty big effort in the next version [after Outlook 2007] to unify different types of communication. For instance, as you get more e-mails, instant messages and voice mails all on the same topic, you'll want to keep them all together. So now in Outlook 2007, you can cut Subject lines from e-mails and paste them into IMs and voice mails so that you can easily group them as part of the same conversation. We also let you group many messages at once into categories organized by color.
I also think people no longer send e-mail just to catch up and say hello. It is much more directed these days. People request meetings and assign tasks, etc., across e-mail. There is often an expected action associated with that e-mail. For instance, in Outlook 2003, you could start assigning tasks to someone via e-mail that would automatically end up on someone's personal Outlook task list. Depending on the company and its culture, that could be viewed as being overly micromanaging, or the recipient may like it because they don't have to worry about losing that task information. We're trying to see how we can help with those things, make calls to action more visible and clear. We have already enhanced tasks in Outlook 2007 so that you can flag an e-mail and it automatically creates a task. That saves you a few clicks. You can also view it on your to-do bar, avoiding the need to jump to another screen.
Was there any particular user feedback that influenced a feature in Outlook 2007? In beta one, we moved the Send button to the right side of the screen. We got pretty vocal feedback from people who were pretty unhappy. We thought the power users would just be sending e-mail with Alt-S. So we ended up moving it back, and got a lot of positive e-mail as a result.
Why have you been so reticent about promoting Outlook 2007? We haven't been shy about talking about Outlook. But there is a pretty big focus at Microsoft on the overall Office system to reinforce that we're not marketing the products individually [Editor's note: Outlook 2007 is available separately for US$109.95], and that there are a lot of benefits from using them together.