After monitoring (and living) the ongoing Microsoft vs. Consumer battle of Outlook 2007. I have been recently delving deeper into the 2010 release. After downloading the 60 day trial I must admit the functionality and interface changes have evolved and presents you with a much stronger solution than the 2007 edition. On this basis I could see the 2010 release penetrating the corporate market and becoming the standard. However, as a best practice marketer who works extensively with web standards and creative design, the following is why on principle I hope it won’t.

After testing the latest beta of Outlook 2010 with HTML creative’s you can instantly see the same pitiable web standards support as 2007, all confirmed last year by the Outlook team stating their plan to continue using Microsoft Word to render HTML emails.

The initial decision from Microsoft to move away from using Internet Explorer to render emails (as they happily were pre-2007) demonstrated their confidence in emails using a MS Word engine rendering correctly across all web browsers. Unfortunately, as web standards go they were wrong!

Coming from the shambles that was the 2007 release was the creation of fixoutlook.org. I was elated to see a growing community of people wanting to make our lives better, rising up against the Microsoft giant, hoping to make sure they took note of the global discontent and that they need to listen to the consumer. So what did MS say?

“Don’t worry people, we’re listening.”

Unfortunately not hard enough as they decided to keep the Word rendering engine for 2010. At least we tried though and I look forward to joining the new protest.