Spammers Want Microsoft to Change Outlook 2010

It bothers me that nerds such as the CTO at Opera who wants the European Union to bail them out of their failure and odd people such as the VP at Mozilla/Google (GOOG) who compares Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to malaria want to foist their market-losing software onto those of us that choose Microsoft products. Why can't these anti-free-market bigots, who proudly proclaim that they don't use Microsoft products anyways, just move on with their lives. Instead they insist that they know better than those of us who have voted over and over again for Microsoft (MSFT) for years with our pocketbooks.

Now admittedly, I only sent Microsoft the equivalent of about $12.50 a year for Office 2003 including Outlook, starting in 2006. Add that $50 to whatever Acer gave Microsoft for the copy of DOS loaded in the PC I bought in 1991, that HP/Compaq gave it for Windows in the the PCs I bought in 1995, 2000 and 2006, and that Lenovo (LNVGY.PK) gave the alleged monopolists for the laptop I bought in 2008. (The laptop came with XP and a free follow up copy of Vista, which I later insisted that Lenovo replace with another copy of XP.) I don't think I needed Microsoft phone support more than once or twice with all those products but I also used their online support occasionally.

Overall I think Microsoft has made about $250 off of me (less in real dollars if you factor in inflation, any money Lenovo recouped from Microsoft for my XP-Vista-XP migration in 2007, and the hour they spent on the phone).

Spending that $250 over two decades was my choice, rather than something dictated to me by a Eurocrat or an Obamacrat. Or worse, by a nerd or person that thinks malaria is funny. As much as marketplace losers like Mike Shaver and Hakon Wium Lie cannot admit it, I know I got a good deal.

Now however a new challenge to me and Microsoft has arisen and this one is going to cost me in time, something much more valuable than a few hundred dollars. The people that bring you spam email newsletters by the millions--a group called the Email Standards Project--wants Microsoft to change the feature in Outlook 2010 that allows you to use Word from within Outlook by default. That's a feature that Microsoft added in Office 2007. In my copy of Office 2003, it took me two or three mouse clicks to enable me to use Word from within Outlook. The spam newsletter guys want Microsoft to change this feature back to the way it was in Office 2003 because... well so--unless you do what I did--their spam newsletters won't look like spam.

This is war. Not only is it going to take me 15 seconds or so to configure Outlook 2010 (I always skip a rev) the way I want it (to work most easily with Word) but if this pro-spam front group is successful, I'll have to spend a second or two on every piece of their newsletter spam deciding whether it is spam or not.

(NOTE: I also received Word and Excel on one of those 1990ish PCs and the two applications worked fine until replaced by Office 2003 in 2007. In fact the old Word and Excel still work fine. For email, before I received Outlook with Office 2003, I used whatever email my ISP gave me, going back to when my "ISP" was Compuserve.)

Comments

[Highonlife:]

Market losing software? Something that has gone from 0% market share to 20 + some odd % market share is a market losing software?
On the other hand IE which has gone from 95 or something % to about 80% or lower is a market share gaining software?

Jun 25 07:17 AM

[redbaron:]

I like the MS email software just like it is, and see no reason for competitors who have some obvious reasons at heart, to lobby for the changes that they would benefit from. If a better email software package can be written, then let someone write it, but leave MS out of it.

Jun 25 09:47 AM

[Compute_This:]

The war for market share and hearts/minds is like any other war. All is fair if you can get away with it. If you can't win on the battlefield of the marketplace, change the rules. Give your product away for free to gain market share. Buy out your competitor. Get laws changed to put your opponent out of business. File expensive long-shot lawsuits against them. So what's new here?

Personally I feel that the EU is stepping way out of bounds in their enforcement efforts against MSFT. While they claim to be leveling the playing field, their complaints about bundled software seem specious and merely a fig leaf to cover their tilt towards their own European based enterprises. Who cares if you have to download and install a competitor to IE? For gosh sake that kind of stuff is so routine that children can do it. I liked MS response that they would just make IE available via download rather than bundle competitors with MS Windows. EU sucks.

Jun 25 11:33 AM

[Jonasion:]

In the light that your needs only amount to 250$ for the past two decades is really impressive, but it also tells me alot about your needs and habits when it comes to the use and understanding of software. Please excuse me if you're a hotshot IT-guru, but the fact that you don't need more software than you do, and that you enjoy a product like Outlook 2003 tells me that you're just not that IT-savy when it comes to alternatives to monopolistic software, as you deftly call naming process.

Don't get me wrong, I love windows, I just recently changed to Mac for the first time in 15 years. I love it, would never go back, unless for gaming reasons and a real good Windows 7. I don't mind IE, but all browsers are better than IE. Firefox is the best, because it allows me to tailor my browser to my work habits. Oh, if you only knew the power of the dark side!

I ended up here on your blog because I was looking for solutions to get a copy of the Outlook 2010 alpha which is out, but not open.

But to get to the point: Microsoft has not, just like Apple is doing it today, never opened their software to the outside world. Just look at hotmail users, they cannot get their email-addresses out of the address book, without having to integrate this and that. It's their address book, if they want to use it with another provider, like google mail, then they should be allowed to integrate out of the MS software. Vendor-lockin is a much too used fascet of IT-business, and I for one adore the European Union for having the balls, when it comes to legislation against monopolistic behaviour. So the more Open Source you get out of MS the better - thank fully the new CEO sees the world this way too, and products from MS will become more open in the future.

For me software is what enables me to do my job fast, precisely and it allows me to juggle many balls at the same time - and it makes me perform better than my colleages - so spending more than 250$ to keep me performing at max is a no brainer for me. Havning software from 5 years ago... I hope you are really good at what you do, or that nobody else does it, because eventually somebody will do it faster and better, simply because they are more open to newer software.

Jul 07 08:49 AM

[ironhacker:]

Whoever is well-served by Microsoft's choice of default settings, it sure isn't me. This is one of the ways MS is trailing Apple. Using Word as the default editor in Outlook just makes it that much worse.

All politics aside, MS Word as an Outlook editor is a support nightmare. It's wastes system resources, and has been the cause of more than a few reboots. I tell people to avoid it like the plague.

Far worse than the default editor is the default message format of RTF. This often results in garbled messages when delivered to the recipient's e-mail system. Sometimes, that recipient is a customer. And of course, the customer is always right. HTML e-mail is slightly better, although rendering can be unpredictable if the sender gets too cute. This is where Word rears its ugly head. It produces overly complicated HTML output, which other people's systems tend to display poorly. Hell, sometimes Outlook displays it poorly! When I send an e-mail, I want to look like a pro, not a clueless newbie who doesn't understand how to send a message.

You are free to choose Word as your default editor, and RTF as your default message format. Sooner or later, you will communicate with someone outside the Microsoft ecosystem. And when you do, recipients are free to giggle at your communication skills. But what is the benefit of stupidity by default?

Leave it to Microsoft to make e-mail harder than it has to be. The goal of e-mail is interoperability, not "How can we flood the Internet with proprietary customizations of standards that only or products can really work with?"

Your ability to send a message is only as good as the recipient's ability to receive it. Get a clue.

Jul 24 09:07 AM