Outlook Dependency

If I’m any barometer of the average American worker, Microsoft may indeed have a bit too much power. I say this, because today I started thinking about my utter dependency on the Microsoft Outlook application.

At our company, Outlook comes installed on all employee computers, and I’ve read that the program is used by more than 100 million people around the world. For those unfamiliar with Outlook, in software parlance, it’s considered a “personal information manager .” You can use Outlook to send and receive emails, set your calendar, store contact information, keep a task list and save random notes. What’s scary is just how much I use Outlook to do all these things.

I mostly communicate by email. I send 25 emails for every phone call I make.. Every appointment I have for the rest of my life is in my Outlook calendar. I even put little reminders in my calendar to do odds and ends. The vast majority of people I know are listed in my contacts section -- in fact, my Rolodex is my Outlook. What I always called my to-do list has been renamed my task list by Microsoft. And those little notes that I used to scratch down on pads -- like precise directions on how to get to our office from the city -- are now in the notes section of Outlook.

On many days, checking in with Outlook is literally the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do before bed. If I woke up one day to find out I could never again access any of the information I had stored in Outlook, the feeling would be similar to finding out my new truck had just been stolen.

Thankfully, this study shows that most people aren’t in quite as deep as me.

Share this post: Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, etc.