Outlook 2010 - The Inevitable Letdown
Apparently the fixoutlook.org campaign was “too little, too late”. When the campaign hit it’s stride and Microsoft took notice, they had unfortunately already begun developing the next version of Outlook: Outlook 2010. And with the development of their new email client comes the same glaring issue all email marketers find so abhorrent: using the Word engine to display their emails.
Dave Grenier from CampaignMonitor has been pivotal in putting this on Microsoft’s radar in the first place. He’s had direct correspondence with Microsoft’s development team for some time now and reported the following from them:
“At this point, our plans for email authoring and rendering in Outlook 2010 are unchanged. However, I can tell you that this is a significant topic of discussion as we plan our business going forward, and something we will definitely be thinking about for future releases of Outlook.“
The highly-regarded testing service, Litmus, had access to test the Beta version of Outlook 2010 and have posted their results here. Needless to say, they’re not surprising and are more or less in-line with what we’ve come to expect from Outlook.
So hopefully by 2013, Microsoft will release another email client—this time using a significantly better rendering engine thus allowing for elements such as background images to render correctly… Emphasis on “hopefully”.
Posted by Bryan Quilty on Mar. 30, 2010