Outlook Necromancy: Why doesn’t anyone clean up after themselves?

My employer uses Microsoft 365 and I’m on Win11 24H2 and the latest version of Outlook—pretty current. Anyway, reading my email and… ooh an interesting term. I highlight said term and right-click to search the internet for more, and I’m met with a helpful sidebar that declares, “We are sorry, but this feature is deprecated” with proffered links to office.com and another to “Search on Bing”.

I select the latter as a convenient way to get to Edge (against my better judgement) and am feeling hopeful – maybe Bing will even help me today! Instead, the link just launches the Bing homepage in an Internet Explorer window for me to type the search myself like a peasant. In Internet Explorer, even…I was a little surprised to see that the standalone version still existed. I just closed everything out at that point.

I’m fully aware (and reminded several times a minute) that Outlook is probably the creakiest Office app and is slowly being phased out, that software fit-and-finish is boring and hard. My complaint is also very minor and doesn’t really impact me much.

It does make me wonder, if Microsoft is so willing to leave to leave cruft like that in plain sight, what does everything look like behind the scenes? Someone had to place the “deprecated, sorry!” message in the sidebar at some point. Would it have been so much harder for the right-click menu to launch a browser window and bypass the search pane? Even removing the search option from the menu altogether is arguably better than displaying a sad parade of broken software windows.

Now my Vyvanse is kicking in and I’ll return to focusing on my actual job – as much Outlook allows me to, at least.