Microsoft Responds to FixOutlook.org

Here's Microsoft's response to the FixOutlook.org initiative. Not sure I like the tone:

The Power of Word in Outlook

This morning we became aware of a Twitter campaign run from the website http://fixoutlook.org. This campaign is intended to provide Microsoft with feedback about our decision to continue to use Microsoft Word for composing and displaying e-mail in the upcoming release of Microsoft Outlook 2010. The Email Standards Project, which developed the website that promotes the current Twitter campaign, is backed by the maker of “email marketing campaign” software.

First, while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages. You can read more about this in our whitepaper, outlining the benefits and the reason behind using Word as Outlook’s e-mail editor.

...

Word has always done a great job of displaying the HTML which is commonly found in e-mails around the world. We have always made information available about what HTML we support in Outlook; for example, you can find our latest information for our Office 2007 products here. For e-mail viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers.

We are focused on creating a great e-mail experience for the end user, and we support any standard that makes this better. To that end, Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs. There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products. We are constantly working to improve our products and the experience that they give to our customers.

As usual, we appreciate the feedback from our customers, via Twitter or on our Outlook team blog. 

-- William Kennedy 

Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team 

Microsoft Corporation

Comments

[(NasirHuq) - SEO COMPANY]

I should say that some email should be kept for Microsoft news and daily update and every people like me would very much interested for latest edition. This is only for survive through outlook feature

[Chris Healey]

If I want a great email experience with Microsoft, I will send emails from Microsoft to somebody with Microsoft and only accept emails from people who are composing and sending with Microsoft.

Looks like they are not getting the message.

[John Ginsberg]

So why don't we work with Microsoft to set a standard? I'm sure both vendors and marketers alike would be happier knowing that they have a say in the final product.

If Microsoft is listening on Twitter, it may be the most effective way of communicating our intentions to them. I'm sure vendors of other email clients (including Google) would also be interested in participating for the greater good.

[Stefano Bagnara]

"There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability"

Well, this is probably true. So, given that there is no consensus, they decided to support less than anyone else. Make sense. To idiots.

The fact is that what Word supports IS NOT a subset of HTML: just try to make a table with cellspacing and cellpadding (Plain, simple, HTML 3, no HTML4/5, no CSS) and see that Word renders it differently from any standard HTML renderer, simply because it "emulate" html using a different engine having different logics.

It is not a subset, it is a different render.

I took their documentation about what is supported and what is not supported from outlook 2007. I then took an HTML email and removed anything that was not supported and rendered it in a standard web client. Then I took both, the original and the stripped html and rendered them through Outlook and they looked different each other (because "unsupported" for Microsoft means: we have no idea of what it will render) and also different from the standard rendering of supported attributes (because "supported" for Microsoft means: we tried to make it standard but we have no idea of what it will render).

[GoodDog]

That's about what I expected from them. Why should they care what people think when they've managed to strong arm such a large market share?