Yes, Microsoft stepped in it, as can happen, and meanwhile has pulled the flawed updater. It will undoubtedly issue a patched updater soon. But you only quoted the part of the MacWorld article that mentioned others had experienced the problem, and omitted the workaround for the problem provided. Read that here:
Undoing the damage wrought by Microsoft's Outlook update.
Whether or not this episode should argue in favor of switching to another email client I'll leave to others to discuss.
