Calendar — The 30 year old app that did not update for the Video conferencing era…

When I look at the current calendar apps in our phones in 2021, the thing that strikes me is they are the same apps that have been there for time planning since the first version of Microsoft Outlook and black and white Nokia's since they had an internet (WAP!) connection.

And since then, really nothing has changed in the way we do things.

I can still create an event. I can invite other people. I can set a time, title, description. I can add a video conferencing tool, which then gets written into the description (seriously?). The only thing Apple and Google do is check if the location happens to be an address and add a map and some travel times into it. But thats pretty much the only “frontend” innovation to calendar in the last 20 years.

I would have hoped by now — Google or Apple or someone would have nailed this and figured it out. And primarily, its a huge opportunity for Microsoft, who have for example bought an amazing app called Sunrise — only to fully integrate it into Office 365 and lose some of its magic.

Its sad that time planning never got a real update since then — there are third party apps that make it a little better, but until Microsoft, Google (Android and Google Workspace teams), and Apple really agree on how the calendar formats are going to look like and set some automatic standard.

If the calendars were an app to be updated, here would be a list of hot fixes that would need to be integrated ASAP:

1. Join meeting — no, I don't want to go into the
2. HTML support — universal HTML support for description — funny enough, Apple doesn't support this (???) leaving you with these — see below…
3. Social profiles — yeah you heard me, social profiles need to exist — not only avatars, but when I met these folks, last emails exchanges, titles, Slack links, etc. — my universal overview and time planner
4. Communication between Office 365 and Google Workplace set-ups

Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple must come together and upgrade the old meeting standards and improve them — so that these apps can be uploaded. Google is in a very unique position, since it owns both Google Workspace and Android, and if only they just make a deal with Microsoft, it would create a better user experience.