Why MS doesn't like categories?

I’m using Outlook and Exchange both at work and privately. And I love them. I like how rules are working in Exchange and the way it syncs. I like Outlook vast functionality. Maybe I’m strange, but I don’t really like Gmail’s WebUI, it just isn’t for me. Even though it has advantages, like ability to view images. I can’t imagine me using email through the browser without OWA. I also like Outlook categories more than Gmail’s labels.

The thing is that they’ve broken this functionality in Office 2013. Categories are still supported, but not so convenient as they’ve used to be. Previously you’ve had special checkbox on each representation of email message on the list. So you could right click on it to choose the category or left click and quickly assign the default one (Quick click). Now this checkbox is missing. So you need to right click on the message, choose Categorize option and then the category you want to assign to the message. Obviously quick click doesn’t work anymore. It sucks and I really hate it. I’m still using Preview edition of Outlook 2013, so maybe it was fixed, but I doubt it. I also haven’t seen the new OWA yet, hopefully it’s not changed there, but I doubt it as well.

Still, I’m looking forward to buying business subscription as soon as it’ll arrive. Why? Because there are many things about new Outlook which I really love, just to name few:

  • You can write reply in the same window where original message was, no more pop-up. I really hope that OWA would work the same way.
  • Smooth animation when writing text. It’s just the look, but I really like it.
  • Searching with special characters, like “-”, works. In Outlook 2010 it returned nothing.

Maybe these are not big things, but they’re making my life a little easier. So as I’m already subscriber of O365 this would be only natural thing for me to switch to new environment. Hopefully this process would be smooth as I definitely don’t want to loose my mailbox.

UPDATE:
I’ve noticed that there are categories handled in the old good way in Outlook 2013, but only for Tasks. I haven’t noticed it for quite some time as I’ve never felt the need to use categories for tasks.

Categories for tasks