Why does Microsoft hate us so?

Ok, well "hate" might be pushing it, but here we are 16 days into the New Year and already email marketers are disappointed with the way 2007 is shaping up. It was reported last week at Campaign Monitor that Microsoft’s updated release of Outlook will be ditching IE’s HTML rendering engine and replacing it with Word’s less-than-stellar rendering engine. So what does this actually mean? In short it means that the Outlook of the not-too-distant-future will be extremely limited. Here are a few features that it does not support:

o No support for background images (HTML & CSS)
o No support for forms
o No support for flash
o No support for CSS floats
o No support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
o No support for CSS positioning
o No support for animated GIFs

Here’s an example of how a standard HTML email renders using Outlook 2003:



Now here’s the same email using Outlook ‘07’s implementation of Microsoft Word’s HTML engine:



Since Outlook is the most widely used client among businesses (79.6%) and one of the leading clients for consumers (15% for consumers – third to AOL and Yahoo!), both the creative individuals and email marketers need to re-evaluate their coding standards in order for their emails to comply with Outlook 2007’s lackluster capabilities.

You would think with as powerful and influential a company like Microsoft is, they would be raising the bar higher. But unfortunately, they’ve taken 10 steps backward. They’ve completely dropped the ball and have lowered their standards to match those of their competing clients such as Lotus and Eudora.

For additional information on Outlook 2007’s rendering capabilities go here and here.

Way to go Microsoft. Way. To. Go.