I have an AWESOME idea for you. How about using the feedback here to make improvements instead of ignoring problems for years while coming up with new ways to complicate outlook and change the way we work to justify developer time.

I KNOW this sounds like a crazy idea. But when I think back to all the changes since Outlook 2007, there have been some great additions. But a lot more difficulties as well. And many of them, which first presented in outlook 2010 persist to this day. There are THOUSANDS of feature requests and problems that have been reported, many of which appear to be rather simple to add or fix. And I frequently run into issues that have threads going back to 2010. EIGHT YEARS OF THE SAME PROBLEMS???? But I think this is because they are often broken out into hundreds of separate threads so they don't get attention. Meanwhile you continue to find things that we used to be able to do that we just can't do anymore and many features have been added which as far as most casual and power users I know, are simply useless.

So with this idea I want to submit three more. Which I'm sure have been suggested before. No idea is truly original. But I'm not going to waste my time on a search and then try to figure our which of the 50 posts I should add my comments on.

1.) Find a way to have some kind of soft AI here to aggregate threads that are similar so you get a REAL feel for what actually needs to be fixed and what features people want. The facts point to the average user often doesn't know the correct terms to search for and don't realize that by creating new threads they reduce the attention their issue will get.

2.) Power users (like me) often get tired of reporting anything because we've already spent countless hours trying to help you improve your products only to be ignored or given some useless response as a "fix".

3.) Train your people who answer questions, your "subject matter experts" to actually READ and understand the posts and complaints before responding. I can't tell you how many times I've come here after finding my problem in a search only to see that someone asked for a very specific solution and spent their time documenting what they had already tried only to see the response from Microsoft as being something they already stated that they had tried.

I'm willing to bet that your people are "rated" based on the number of responses they post, not on the number of actual solved problems. You probably need a new rewards based system with a feedback mechanism. You have that on your posted "answers" Site but not on the direct message boards.
So maybe each response should have a "Please rate this response" with a 1-5 choice with 1 being "The rep answered the question with a solution that I had clearly stated I have tried and it didn't work"

Seriosly. You guys are freaking MICROSOFT! Once the owners of the market. And you've let things slide so badly that you now have tons of competition. If you hadn't been so successful in the past, you wouldn't have the market share that you do. It's difficult to make major changes and the larger the company, the harder it is. But still, there were enough issues that continued to be ignored, on and expesive product compared to others that you've lost a lot of your market share to new competition that saw your problems and solved them while you continued to ignore them . For example:

In 2013 you removed ALL COLOR THEMES.... Really?
At least in 2016 you gave us a couple options back.

Dragging and dropping of a task to the calendar can no longer be done.

I'm not going to go on. You have a full message board of it. Why not use it?