If you’ve been on Twitter today, you probably have noticed that Outlook 2010 is a trending topic. Why all the hype surrounding Microsoft’s new and unreleased email client? A group called the Email Standards Project recently started a website called FixOulook.org in response to Microsoft’s plan to use Word as the rendering engine for Outlook 2010. This microsite is rallying people together to get Microsoft’s attention, in an attempt to ensure they comply with standards and use a web-based browser to render emails.
The new Outlook 2010 is still a year away from its commercial release. As such, Microsoft’s designers are beta testing its new features and are looking for public input on the software. A blog post on the Email Standards website gives an insight into Microsoft’s thought process surrounding their decision to make Outlook 2010 a walled garden and to not support web standards.
To quote from that blog post, when asked why Outlook 2010 is using Word to compose email, Microsoft project manager Dev Balasubramanian said:
“The reason for this lies in the benefit Outlook users gain by having Word as their e-mail authoring tool; rich tools like SmartArt, automatic styles and templates, and other benefits found in Word 2007 and 2010 enable Outlook users to write professional looking and visually stunning messages.”
“I am aware of where this decision on our part places Outlook from a standards perspective – at the same time, we ask that you consider the benefits Outlook users get from having Word tools in their e-mail authoring experience.”
This is simply not acceptable from the perspective of any person that uses html when writing emails. Every single other email client uses a web-based rendering tool that presents emails in the same manner. If Microsoft proceeds as planned, Outlook users will see broken html emails from everyone that composed that email using any software other than Outlook. Do you want to see broken emails in your Outlook inbox?
Even worse than seeing broken emails in your inbox is sending out emails that were composed in Outlook. If you currently use Outlook 2007, you know what I’m talking about. You write a nice email and format the text, colors, and images to look professional and clean. Then you send the email, and the world opens it in Gmail or Yahoo, and your nice email looks like garbage. Why? Because Outlook 2007 composed the email using Word, which no other email client can understand. Outlook 2007 just made you look stupid. Enough is enough – Outlook 2010 needs to supports web standards.
To make your voice heard on this issue, send a Twitter update with the link http://fixoutlook.org in it. There are over 16,000 people that have sent tweets with this link so far! For more info, check out the Email Standards Project.
Just another example of how social media is changing the world…
1 comment
1 ping
Sebastian says:
July 10, 2010 at 11:25 am (UTC -7 )
I have followed this discussion for a long time and I have a question. Isn’t there a possibility to unite both standards or to integrate a way to switch between them? I personally think, that this is not the best solution but maybe there is a third-party-developper able to fix this, it would not be the first time that someone other than Microsoft has the solution (lookout and its successor lookeen for example are much better search tools than the search in Outlook).
Microsoft Responds to FixOutlook.org Twitter Campaign | Software News Daily says:
September 8, 2010 at 4:59 pm (UTC -7 )
[...] I reported last week, there is a Twitter campaign in progress that is attempting to change the way Outlook [...]