Since Windows 10 was released I’ve periodically opened and attempted to use the Mail and Calendar applications that come preinstalled and in theory provide an integrated experience. As far as UWP applications go, there aren’t many that I look to as great showcases of what the platform is capable of but I figured that Microsoft would invest in their first party applications (there’s also Maps and a few others). It’s taken a few iterations but both Mail and Calendar are actually working quite well – they both support multi-window (although it’s a tad annoying that you can’t tell it to open items in a new window by default), and the UI generally has a lot of polish. However, that’s pretty much where the fairy tale ends.
The reality is that the Mail and Calendar applications are separate applications, and thus when you attempt to do things like “create a meeting from an email”, something that’s a simple drag and drop in Outlook, you are completely out of luck. Further more, despite quite a lot of effort having gone into the visual design, I still find that I’m struggling with basic things like scanning my email and seeing which items are read/unread and which ones I should be focussing on.
I know that these applications aren’t designed as a complete substitute for Outlook but I do wonder who makes the decisions on where the investment in these products is spent. Is there no focus on productivity, or is it just a competition to have the best looking design?