Outlook: If it’s broke, why fix it

Anyone working with electronic marketing or, more precisely, email campaigns will have surely heard of the great downgrade that took place in Outlook HTML email rendering capabilities when Microsoft upgraded it’s Office product family from 2003 to 2007. In short, MS switched from Internet Explorer to Word as the rendering engine for HTML emails inside Outlook. The rest is history, and as you can see from the image below, also the future, since things will not get any better when Outlook 2010 will be released.

Campaign Monitor, an email campaign service provider, has been very vocal about the lack of progress in improving the email experience of the millions of corporate users (myself included, of course) who are stuck with using MS Outlook for all email communication at work. They have even set up a campaign called fixoutlook.org, where 24,000 people have already tweeted their support for the good cause that Campaign Monitor is promoting.

Given that Office 2010 has pretty much been designed and developed by now, I wasn’t expecting any direct impact from the campaign to the actual end product that will be Outlook 2010. However, the official response to the campaign from Microsoft’s VP of Office Communications is quite stunning. It manages to reach way beyond the level of corporate BS that I would have expected MS to produce. So far, in fact, that I’ll just settle for one quote from the response and encourage you to go and read the rest of Ben Ward’s excellent post on the topic.