"I distinctly recall people being excited by the product."
I think it's more that people were excited by the promises about the product, and what it could have been. I've tried it 4 or 5 times since it launched, and always uninstalled within a few days. And I'm a heavy Outlook user, searching mail is a serious pain point for me.
They too often focus on 'non-corporate' (basically, useless) features: social network integration, counting who emailed you the most and other stats, ... while the actual UI was hard to use and not in line with the rest of Outlook, searching only selected folders was only included after a long time (I don't want to search my RSS and mailing list folders, I don't think I'm special in that), sorting/filtering/search in search was unintuitive to use, ... It always felt like the features were put in to look nice in a marketing pitch, and that nobody at the company actually actively used the product. I guess that's not the case but it felt that way.
I think it's more that people were excited by the promises about the product, and what it could have been. I've tried it 4 or 5 times since it launched, and always uninstalled within a few days. And I'm a heavy Outlook user, searching mail is a serious pain point for me.
They too often focus on 'non-corporate' (basically, useless) features: social network integration, counting who emailed you the most and other stats, ... while the actual UI was hard to use and not in line with the rest of Outlook, searching only selected folders was only included after a long time (I don't want to search my RSS and mailing list folders, I don't think I'm special in that), sorting/filtering/search in search was unintuitive to use, ... It always felt like the features were put in to look nice in a marketing pitch, and that nobody at the company actually actively used the product. I guess that's not the case but it felt that way.