As for the underlings who refuse to accept reality… I think seppuku would be far more an honourable option for them.

The executioner replied, “yes sir, but please, kindly nod”.

I think it’s time the directorship at Microsoft should nod.
They are dead and just don’t know it yet.

I remember some days like that when I worked at DEC. But those situations are different. The environment is much more homogeneous now, and standards are well-inked. My issue with Microsoft is their blatant and deliberate ignorance of them. It baffles me why they would think this way.

The IE engine can be easily bundled separately (and independently) as a library for use within any application. There is no reason I can think of why they’d go to the trouble of exporting Word’s HTML engine separately, and not do it with a far-superior rendering engine.

Outlook-to-Outlook is fine for internal communication, but in my experience most people don’t go to those extremes anyway — they usually include Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or PDF attachments to do that stuff for them.

“And it raises the question: Why is Microsoft — yet again — refusing to listen to the people who know best? Not the developers of a system, but its users.”

Back in the dark ages (late 80′s, very early 90′s) IBM came out with a new workstation running it’s own version of UNIX (one would thing with the number of OS installs I did that I would remember what it was called….RSX maybe?). The software company I worked for at the time had things running on 4 different UNIX platforms, three of which had very similar and the fourth, well lets just say that while many of the commands were similar, the operators/modifiers were very, very different. It took weeks to track down the proper operators (if they even existed) and to modify things like the software installation scripts. Being just out of school, I was able to get away with asking such awkward questions as “Why is this so different?” The answer – “IBM doesn’t follow standards, they set standards.” Strangely enough, when the next version of their workstations and OS came out, it looked a whole lot more like SunOS (pre Solaris).

Unfortunately, that same company that I worked for all those years ago was just as guilty as Microsoft in not listening to what was really wanted by the users. We had two parallel development streams at the time (why is a long and sordid tale I won’t go into here) and working for the “other” one, I was tasked with talking to the field reps about what new features the customer base wanted. Of course, those leading the regular development stream got wind of this and insisted on telling me that the customers really didn’t want digital elevation models, that they wanted more colours to display on their maps. It’s almost 20 years later and I still have to shake my head……

It strikes me as reasonable if you are interested iin Outlook-Outlook communication, of course.

But from the white paper, it seems that rendering of incoming HTML-based e-mail is done by Outlook and it is the same whether a matching version of Word is isntalled or not.

That they’ve chosen to not make their engine dependent on Internet Explorer is reasonable, especially since they can’t count on IE being there and then claim they don’t want to be dependent on IE updates (or updates to the HTML support that is bolted into Windows).

Personally, I only render receive and display e-mail in plaintext. If it also has an HTML form, I will look at that only when it is from a trusted source and I am interested in reading it that way. I also like the ability to read e-mail while off-line, especially when reviewing older e-mails. In those cases, the e-mails that are self-contained and don’t require access to web sites in order to render are far more preferable for me, and the standards for that seem to be good enough.

For authoring without Word, you can control that by not having a matching version of Word (2007 or 2010, respectively) installed on the machine running Outlook.