Microsoft "solutions" come and go

Just another cloudy day in the walled garden.

Microsoft May Be Planning To Discontinue This Meeting-Coordination Service

Fixing calendaring for fun and profit -- yet again. We pay the bill.

Over on Facebook, Brad Kellmeyer writes: "Marissa Mayer's venture Smart Contacts is moving into Facebook's first office location. The world’s most advanced, intuitive contact manager. Good vibes? Marissa Mayer built her career at big companies reliant on digital advertising, initially at Google and later as CEO of Yahoo. But in her first startup, Sunshine, Mayer has opted to go in the opposite direction. Sunshine plans to charge consumers for subscriptions to generate revenue for its products, which will start with a contact management app and evolve to include appointment scheduling, event hosting and other apps, she told attendees of The Information’s Future of Startups Conference."

My comment: We’ve been waiting for scheduling and calendar interoperability for the length of the history of the Internet. Instead, we get this 💩 again and again.

Oh and here's the wide-eyed story from the "award-winning journalism" of The Information.

6 Tools to Sync Microsoft Outlook With Google Calendar

 From November 2021: 6 Tools to Sync Microsoft Outlook With Google Calendar.

Memo to self: People expect default meeting details are in the siloed calendar

A shift happened during the pandemic, and I'm just now realizing it.

Before, if I put my phone number in a Google Calendar invitation, people would expect to call me, or perhaps to have me call them.

After, Google Calendar sets up a Google Meet location, and that's where people expect me to be.

Between Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet, my laptop is a mess of siloed meeting spaces.

A funny meme that isn't so funny considering the sorry state of calendar and schedule interop

I haven't posted here in quite some time, mostly because the sort of calendaring and scheduling interoperability I advocated for in decades past is no closer to happening. The swamp remains full. But this meme hit a nerve for me.

If we had accepted and adopted calendaring and scheduling standards that weren't vendor-specific, there's no reason every GPS wouldn't be able to fill in the context at a given destination.

When the itch we want to scratch goes on itching for 15 years or more, it descends into memetic farce.

A Windows 10 calendar interop mystery

 I've been gradually getting up to speed with Mozilla Thunderbird running on Windows 10, and I've encountered a mystery.

I received an iCal invite via Thunderbird, and attempted to share it to my Google Calendar by linking my Google account to Windows 10. But when I completed this, the invitation showed up not on my Google Calendar, but instead on the Windows 10 calendar.

I would have thought that using a Google login would have propagated the meeting to Google's calendars. Am I doing something wrong?

Microsoft clobbers its own internal calendar interoperability

After a couple of decades, I really can't be surprised by any inaction Microsoft takes on the industry-standard calendar-sharing front, but this latest takes the cake: Not syncing calendar data between Office 365 and a newly-purchased iPhone in a timely fashion, unless the iPhone purchaser first downloads and installs Outlook for iOS.

Shame on Microsoft. Even Steven Sinovsky, the former president of Windows for Microsoft, is pissed.