Many of us can recall the great Outlook fiasco of 2007. Outlook switching from Internet Explorer to MS Word for its email display engine was a move no one expected.

Worse than unexpected, that one decision caused email designers everywhere much consternation. When recipients upgraded to the new Outlook, they lost animated gifs, background images, and so much more.

So now with a new version of Outlook coming out, many designers were hoping for an upgrade to the rendering technology. Microsoft, however, opted for more of the same.

Why, Microsoft? Why?

An outcry on Twitter orchestrated by fixoutlook.org caught the attention of Microsoft and a reply was provided. You can read the Outlook team’s response for yourself. Essentially they have some pretty weak reasons that everyone else has already ripped apart. So at the end of the day, we can complain about it, but I’m not expecting they’re going to change their minds.

What It Means For You

So we’re stuck with pretty much the same old ugly, difficult Outlook for a while longer. But that’s the good news too. We don’t expect there will be many changes between the current version of Outlook and the release in 2010. So there is a silver lining. You shouldn’t have to make many accommodations for this new version of Outlook, something that can’t always be said for email viewer upgrades.

We’ll have more information for you when they get closer to the final release, but we don’t expect there to be a lot for you to do.

What This Means For Email

As Mark Brownlow’s points out, this provides us with a chance to think about the direction and purpose of email. Email viewers, like Outlook, aren’t created for marketers; they are created for emailers.

The main purpose is for people to send a text based messages to friends, family, or for business purposes. Marketers have jumped into the channel and found a good use for it, but it’s not where the average person derives most of their value. As Mark said:

Perhaps it serves as a useful reminder: the format of the medium is important, but not nearly as important as the basic value of the delivered information. We need to make people care what their commercial HTML email looks like and can do.

So perhaps we should focus a bit less on sophisticated layouts and a bit more on providing a solid, relevant value for our recipients. Of course, pretty emails would be nice too. Come on Outlook, where’s the love?

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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