From: Mike N. 


http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/04/19.html

"Search used to be horrible in Outlook. It was so bad that for all
intents and purposes, you couldn't search your old email. Instead, you were
encouraged to carefully sort it out into a hierarchy of folders (shudder).

A bunch of third party fixes appeared. My favorite was called Lookout. It
provided blazingly fast full text search. Searches took less than a second
and really found things. It was built on DotLucene (now called Lucene.Net)
an excellent open source search engine.

Microsoft did the only thing that made sense: they bought Lookout (the
company) and took the product off the market.

People complained.

Microsoft finally put Lookout back up for download, but they sure weren't
happy about it. When Outlook 2007 runs, it checks to see if Lookout was
running and disabled it if it was.

Theoretically, Outlook 2007 has search built in, although it's not really
built-in: it's built on top of Windows Desktop Search, which comes with
Vista and is available as a free download for XP.

The trouble is, Windows Desktop Search is just not that fast. When I
"upgraded" from Outlook XP to Outlook 2007, the only new
"feature" I noticed was that full text searches started taking
about 30 seconds. About 100 times longer than they did with Lookout. And I
couldn't install Lookout: of all the Outlook add-ins in existence, Outlook
specifically refused to run Lookout.

The only possible explanation is that someone on the Outlook team is
getting paid a bonus for convincing people to switch to Gmail.

The story has a happy ending. Last week Microsoft released a patch for
Outlook 2007 which fixed the problem for me (I have a lot of big PST files,
which, I'm told, is why search was so slow for me). Now I can search old
email quickly enough that I don't forget what I was searching for by the
time the results come up. It's not quite as fast as Lookout used to be, but
it's a big improvement and makes Outlook less of a downgrade. "

   I fail to follow the logic of taking a superior product and explicitly
prohibiting its use.

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