Given how strategically important Outlook and Office are to Microsoft and given that most people there eat their own dog food (i.e., use the software they make), we were convinced it wouldn't be long before Microsoft issued an update to address the problems.

This week, I received the following letter from Michael Affronti, Microsoft Office Outlook Program Manager:

Comment regarding "Outlook 2007: a cautionary tale"

Hi David!

My name is Michael Affronti and I'm a Program Manager over here on the Outlook team. I just wanted to let you and your subscribers know about a performance update we've released that addresses many of the problems you and others have been encountering.

I've posted details about it in my blog, as well as our team blog.

You can directly download the patch from our Download Center here.

I encourage everyone to try out the patch if they are encountering these types of performance issues.

Thanks!

Special thanks to Michael and everyone on the Outlook team for addressing this issue so quickly and listening to their customers. We're going to be testing the updates, and we recommend you do the same.

Oh, for the record, we tweaked Michael's note to us slightly to make the URLs a bit more palatable to our content management system.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.