Delayed Sending of Email

Every once in a while, people pitch me a new feature for Outlook: "This is something I'd use every day!" For a large percentage of these, Outlook already does what they want, and it's just hard to find it.

A good example of this is delayed sending of email. Instead of sending the email when you hit "Send", you want to automatically send the email at a later time. Maybe you don't want to give someone the impression that you respond to their emails instantly. Or your press release goes out at midnight but you don't want to be awake at such a late hour.

This feature already exists. In Outlook 2007, it's called "Delay Delivery". When you're composing a message, click the icon in the menu bar, then check "Do not deliver before". In Outlook 2003, click "Options", then "Do not deliver before".



This is a great illustration of both Outlook's greatest strength and greatest weakness. I can easily imagine the corporate IT meetings in the mid-1990s where admins compared the feature matrix of Outlook to that of Lotus Notes, and decided to go with Outlook. Microsoft got everyone to use Outlook partly because it had a complete product with every feature box checked. On the other hand, it created a client with a lot of complexity, where every new release needs to carry the weight of the last one to assure backwards compatibility. Complexity leads to long cycles, and slow products. However, it can also lead to market dominance.

Microsoft's Office Transformation

John K. Waters from Redmond Developer News - a magazine devoted to developing on the Windows platform - wrote an article on how companies are starting to use Office as an extendable platform. Interesting stuff.

The article also has some quotes by me where I talk about Xobni, our experience with Outlook and our plans beyond it. Read it here.

Bill Gates demos Xobni

Earlier this morning, Bill gates demo'd Xobni at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose, California.



Here's a link to the webcast. The demo is about 44 minutes in.

And some quotes from the show:

"Xobni - it's actually the word inbox spelled backwards: This is where someone has come into Outlook and decided to add value. "You look over there to the right, that's their unique display area. They help you understand how you communicate, what groups of people you work with."

"In fact, this is really a social networking set of capabilities, but brought into Outlook itself. So we think it's very, very cool to look at mail messages, extract information, they give you statistics about email patterns. It lets you manage relationships. It actually understands the richness of different types of relationships, which is I think the next generation in social networking. Not just one set of friends who all see the same thing, but rather different relationships and the way you connect up and share information."

"This is a great example of having something like Xobni come in and extend things. It lets us see where people want new capabilities in the Outlook-type environment."

Update: A short video clip with Bill's demo is now on YouTube.