Microsoft: Outlook is Not “Broken”

http://technologizer.com/2009/06/24/microsoft-outlook-is-not-broken/

by FluidDjango • 17 years ago

31 23 17 years ago

TomOfTTB3• 17 years ago

"Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages"

As long as they're sending the e-mail to someone who also has Outlook and who isn't using the Outlook Web Access on their exchange server :)

Seriously though Microsoft's obviously trying to shift the issue to Outlook's use of Word when really the issue is how bad their Word engine renders HTML (though I do think "fixoutlook.org" picked the very worst example for their comparison). It's a good way to win an argument but a bad way to take product suggestions.

edave• 17 years ago

Someone once aptly described to me how Microsoft handles standards as "they take a normal, rational standard that everyone agrees upon, then they screw it up just enough that only their products will work with it."

To be fair- GMail doesn't display background colors either.

antidaily• 17 years ago

Huh. I've had pretty good luck with Gmail and background colors. Maybe because I use tables.

snprbob862• 17 years ago

The primary source was posted 10 hours ago. Please up vote that instead of this blog spam:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=672745

TomOfTTB3• 17 years ago

I think the term Blog Spam refers to people who post their own Blog's posts. I don't see any obvious affliation between this user and the site they linked to.

Moreover the merit of this piece is that it's a short synopsis of the entire story. You can think the article you link to has more validity as the original source and it's your choice to vote that one up and not this one. But it's kind of rude to call this post names simply because you deem it unworthy.

snprbob862• 17 years ago

I've always used the term "blog spam", with respect to social link aggregators, to indicate a blog post which adds no apparent value to the source it is citing. I feel that is true in this case.

Furthermore, I think that this blog is unfairly omitting details from the source material. The official blog post includes significant details about the editing experience of Microsoft Word. The quote in the intermediate blog post does not capture the nature of the Outlook team's argument.

Even if the intermediate post did represent the argument accurately, it includes editorialization which I'd rather see in comments.

Both HN submissions used the official title, as they are supposed to. I posit that this secondary source was upvoted more because of the more dramatic title. The posters are to blame for the discrepancy, not the HN submitters. My apologies for the meta-discussion, but I don't think I'm the only person who doesn't like intermediate, no-value-added blog posts.

philjackson• 17 years ago

I really wish no one had ever thought of putting HTML into an email in the first place.

TwoBit• 17 years ago

While elaborate spam email is annoying, you don't really believe we should all be using plain text, do you?

rjurney• 17 years ago

I believe that we should all be using plaintext for email. Plaintext and simple attachments. So MIME. But not HTML.

furyg3• 17 years ago

Preface: I've only switched away from pine as my personal email client relatively recently...

The vast majority of messages from actual humans in my inbox are composed in plain-text. That doesn't mean it's sent to me in plain text, of course, but as far as the user is concerned they're typing in plain text without marking it up. The major culprit of fancy HTML shenanigans in this type of email is business-card like signatures (totally unnecessary).

Messages which are intentionally formatted in HTML in order to display elaborate things come almost entirely (I'd say 99%) from websites (travelocity, evite), corporate newsletters, spammers, credit-card companies, etc. If those senders were restricted to plain text, those emails would most likely have less crap and more content which is pertinent to me. You don't need complex formatting to let me know my flight information, the my statement is available, or that my password has been successfully reset.

Standardized formatting is important... I'm not saying that we should be restricted to a plan-text only world of email. But formatting restrictions aren't necessarily a bad thing (for extreme example, see Twitter). Just as email doesn't function well as a medium for sending large attachments, it similarly shouldn't be conceived of as a medium for displaying complex, elaborately formatted documents. That's what web browsers, word processors, and spreadsheet programs are for.

Markdown, Basic HTML (1.0), or similar concepts are more than enough to convey your message clearly and directly, while allowing composers to organize their thoughts and link/include non-text information.

zimbabwe• 17 years ago

When you email me I don't need your entire fucking website. I don't need your navigation bar and I don't need your multipaneled displays. If you have something that complex, either you're too lazy to edit your copy or you have something big enough that you should make it its own separate web site.

gnaritas• 17 years ago

>you don't really believe we should all be using plain text, do you?

Yes, mail clients should support plain text only, the world would be a much better place.

gaius• 17 years ago

Wasn't it Netscape who popularized that?

TallGuyShort2• 17 years ago

People should realize that it doesn't matter how much you love your own product - if your customer's hate it, it's broken.

chadgeidel• 17 years ago

Are you sure Microsoft doesn't know this? I would imagine that the vast majority of Outlook users are corporate users. In this case Word is a better choice.

JimmyL• 17 years ago

We're not Microsoft's primary customer when it comes to considering Outlook. Neither is Travelocity, or pretty much anyone that would know what CSS even was, let alone be unhappy about the rendering used for it (or even know what a rendering engine was).

Their core customer is Janice from Accounting, who sits on the Party Planning committee at BigCo. and wants to send out an invite to the company's Thanksgiving Party, for which she has selected some excellent WordArt to use.

It's Phil the low-level VB.net developer, whose idea of version control is sending an email to himself with a huge attachment every night so he can recover off that if need be.

It's Stacy from HR, whose email signature is in a pink script font, so that we know she's given that email a personal touch when she "signs" it like that.

That's who Outlook is designed for - big corporate offices, where all 90% of the people want is to be able to send colorful emails with a drag-and-drop toolbar using an interface they are already intimately familiar with. And by that standard, their customers probably love the decision to use Word's authoring engine, and will simply blame the people they got the email from when it doesn't look right.

Think of it this way: if you even know this controversy exists, you're a more technical user than those which Outlook is designed for.

TallGuyShort2• 17 years ago

Yeah, that's a very good point. I guess it's the same as the frustration we have with IE. Most people don't even notice a problem because they don't care. I'm not saying they SHOULDN'T care (at least on some issues), but I it really isn't Microsoft's target audience.

bitwize• 17 years ago

Combining e-mail and calendaring, and integrating it with the rest of the Office Suite was a masterstroke on Microsoft's part. It has streamlined office communication to the point where even shops where development is done on Linux machines have Exchange servers handling company email and I get funny looks from people who ask me, "That meeting didn't show up on your Outlook?"

Outlook is broken only if you give a shit about openness or standards. Most people don't. Most people want to solve the problems immediately before them to make their lives easier. This Outlook achieves with aplomb.

Microsoft: Outlook is Not “Broken”

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