I don’t usually forward along anything that smells-like-petition, but everyone in the Web development community should be aware of this. Microsoft has publicly confirmed that they are using a rendering engine (from MS-Word), dating back to before the year 2000, in their upcoming Outlook 2010 product. Have a look at the difference between how Outlook 2000 and 2010 will render a simple HTML newsletter in this article by Campaign Monitor:
The scariest part of the article is the position of the Outlook Product Manager:
Having multiple HTML engines could reduce performance, as well as create an inconsistency in terms of what type of content the user is able to create vs. consume.
Microsoft is using the Word rendering engine so emails composed in Outlook will look consistent when viewed by other Outlook users.
In other words, more walled garden thinking. The old Microsoft is back at it again. I mean, um, the whole world uses Outlook right? Cough.
MS claims they’re listening. Outlook 2010 is still in Beta for another year so there’s time to raise a little hell. See if we can smack some sense into them. This is a ridiculous step backwards.
