Users of Microsoft’s Mail, Calendar and People applications will find themselves with software packages that stop working by the end of this year. The desktop trio reach their end-of-support phase December 31 2024 according to Microsoft, and users’ data can be exported to the web-based Outlook app.

Users’ accounts set up in the separate Mail and Calendar applications will see an export moving their settings and all data to Microsoft’s servers when the transition to Outlook takes place, and if their email accounts are provided by a third party – that is, not Microsoft – all data will pass through Microsoft’s servers.

That detail means the company will get to access to mail, calendar, and contact details of users who aren’t using Microsoft-related email. Users of Microsoft accounts are, of course, already happy with that arrangement.

In addition to the obvious privacy concerns to non-Microsoft users, the move will further cement the control over the internet’s email traffic in the hands of a few large companies, which increasingly dictate which email providers can reliably send and receive messages.

On the positive side, users will get to use the new, web-based Outlook instead of Microsoft Mail, People and Calendar, which the company breathlessly describes as “designed to help you easily connect and coordinate your various email accounts and calendars in one place, with a sleek and modern interface. You can […] get intelligent suggestions with built-in AI, seamlessly and securely attach important documents and photos to any note, and access OneDrive files and Office web apps without a subscription.”

The imminent demise of the three ‘traditional’ desktop applications is something Microsoft users are familiar with. Projects ditched, or soon to be ditched for those in favour of services designed to keep the company’s grip firm on the portion of the computing eco-system it controls, include:

• Windows Subsystem for Android: lets users run Android apps on the desktop. Android is a Google project,
• Visual Studio for Mac: a software development studio that ran on Apple’s macOS,
• Skype for Business: Replaced by Teams, and typically bundled with Office 365. Teams was created to be a surrealist nightmare of user interface design that somehow made it into production,
• Windows Server Essentials: Known as Small Business Server and aimed at organisations with fewer than 50 devices, SBS provided several locally-hosted services,
• Windows Storage Server: Designed to let users store files locally on their network, an idea that became out of step with Microsoft’s cloud-first approach. WSS had the disadvantage of making users’ data unavailable for easy mining by Microsoft,
• Hyper-V Server: a free hypervisor that let users run operating systems (including non-Microsoft OSes) as virtual machines,
• Cortana: The voice assistant that doubled as chocolate teapot no one used, named after the anthropomorphic AI in the Halo video game series.

The irony that’s been present in the desktop computing space for over 30 years is that, after paying for the privilege of using Microsoft software and services, its users have little or no control over how the software treats their data. After paying a premium for the Windows operating system and a rolling subscription for basics like an office suite and communications software, the company scans, mines and disseminates its users’ data, with little or no option to prevent it.

The decision to shutter the three desktop applications and the ongoing transition to the web-based ‘new’ Outlook (desktop Outlook will receive support for the next five years) is a feature of Microsoft’s business model that is so normalised it rarely gets mention.