Give Microsoft some credit: they quickly took note of the campaign to “ Fix Outlook ” that went crazy viral on Twitter this morning, and have issued a response. In case you missed it earlier, the Fix Outlook campaign is essentially a protest “against the Microsoft decision to use Word to render HTML emails, which will make designers’ lives a misery due to its failure to display these mails properly.” So far, nearly 20,000 people have tweeted the link to the movement’s homepage, fixoutlook.org . Microsoft’s addresses the issue in a post this afternoon to the Outlook Team Blog, where the company notes that it “appreciates the feedback” but defends its position and makes clear that it has no intention of making the changes that the Fix Outlook movement seeks. The reasoning? William Kennedy, VP of Microsoft Office’s Communications and Forms Team writes: “While we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail , just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages.” Continuing,

Microsoft does say that it is all for standards, just not for the ones that Fix Outlook is proposing they adhere to: “Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs. There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products. We are constantly working to improve our products and the experience that they give to our customers.” In other words, we hear you, but we’re keeping things exactly the same as planned in Outlook 2010. Not surprisingly, commenters on Microsoft’s post are quickly taking issue with the response. That said, the response is not at all surprising. On the scale of Microsoft, 20,000 tweets are hardly enough to drive product changes. But judging from today’s activity, it’s unlikely the Fix Outlook campaign will die quietly, and could remain a thorn in Microsoft’s side in the immediate future. Reviews: Twitter Tags: microsoft , microsoft outlook , twitter

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Microsoft Sees Your Tweets, But They’re Not Fixing Outlook