If you feel adventurous you could even apply this line of thought to many other very large multinational US-led "IT" companies. Maybe that would even give you an alternative perspective on why the EU (just to mention one random non-US entity) is getting, well, less cooperative, lately.

Philosophically speaking it's an interesting path of thought, but to bring you back to real life of course there is no such thing.

This is a thought experiment only. Of course no American company would ever even think about engaging in such activities, and if you ask any employee of said company (or any of their peers) they would have absolutely no knowledge of such activity and the mere thought is outrageous, of course.

Down-votes anticipated, so this comment might not last long.

And when companies all over are doing it at the same time feels like a "recession" or whatever is looming.

Depends on who you ask. I guess "there were no ads on it" is an applicable answer from MS point of view.

It's not particularly different from other web email apps, the issue is Microsoft is changing models from email client to web app and they're not being very upfront about it.

There were workarounds to redirect the mail to Gmail and manage everything from there instead, but they cracked down on them one after another. The last time I didn't manage to avoid it, so now I'm stuck with that piece of crap.

Outlook comes with Windows, it works.

What in some sense has me worried is that even Microsoft doesn't really care about native applications anymore. It's rather hard to take a software company serious, when they don't even want to develop to their own native API. The whole thing is primarily a result of Outlook becoming a blood webapp.

Is there honestly any reason why they couldn't bundle the real Outlook, the one they sell to businesses?