Hi Outlook.com

I think I will go full cloud with my email and I'm considering to go gmail or outlook.com. However when I try to test outlook.com from my 3rd party email client it seems that IMAP is not supported. I almost can't believe it! Can someone enlighten me on this? I have seen other posts about it and find that outlook.com does not offer IMAP access but not why. I'm looking for an explanation for why this is, since it doesn't add up when Microsoft are aiming more and more to the cloud and one of the most important and widely supported protocols for this is left out.

thanks in advance
Søren