Win 8 (or 8.1) is a horrible version. It’s opaque, frustrating and not good at all for business users. They wanted the interface to be similar to the Windows phone (touchscreen), wanted to drive everything to the cloud, and completely dumped the business users are who doing more than social media but actually want easily accessible programs that work all the time. MS is also trying to drive Office Suite users to its cloud-based Office 365.
In a lot of ways, MS jumped the gun. I don’t think people are demanding total cloud-based services quite yet, and making everything cloud based at a time when many areas still do not even have stable or sufficient internet service or bandwidth for users to be able to connect reliably or steadily is a mistake. Also, doing away with things in their Office Suite that are still essential for most users (such as the ability of Outlook to get POP based e-mail, something it can no longer do even though the majority of e-mail in this country goes through ISPs that use a POP3 system) is a big mistake. This is particularly true since the users of Windows 8 are generally working at a desktop or a large laptop, using big complex programs, and are not the unemployed Pajama Boy sitting around using a phone or tablet to text his friends about Obamacare in between sending out the occasional selfie.
So MS is now suggesting complicated work-arounds or additional non-MS add-ins that can restore some very basic functionality (the start button, for example), and generally floundering.
It’s a pity. Windows 7 was good, stable, if not very fast, and they shouldn’t have tried to make such a radical change, especially to technologies that are less than developed.
My outlook 2003 runs fine in POP in Windows 8.1
This is BS propaganda!