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Outlook is Broken, Let’s Fix It

“Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010. This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more.”

From FixOutlook.org. You’ll need a Twitter account to participate, although anyone can go to the Microsoft site and and complain/suggest they either fix their Word rendering engine or not use it in Outlook 2010. It’s rather odd, too, given the outrage a few years ago when Microsoft pre-emptively switched the HTML rendering engine to their crippled Word HTML rendering engine. While that decision made business sense — it’s less cost and less complexity to use one tool across multiple software packages, it is amazing they still have not fixed the very broken Word HTML rendering engine. They’ve had years.

In any event, the FixOutlook.org site also is interesting because they’re gathering all the tweets and avatars. So it’s a visual representation of the hive mind. Very cool. Now is a good time to speak up on this issue.

And, if you missed it, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft recently told Blooomberg that, in response to the Obama Administration closing a corporate tax loophole, “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.” While corporate profits are important, so is the ability of Americans to have high paying jobs so they can buy houses, send kids to school, take vacations, and buy stuff like Microsoft software. It’s a matter of balance. With this Outlook 2010 decision, and comments about destroying US jobs to avoid taxes, Microsoft seems very out of balance lately.

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