This is the perfect example of how Microsoft just doesn't get it, and how their best days are over. Here you have a community of important and influential programmers and developers screaming out that your product sucks, and in typical Microsoft fashion, instead of considering the complaint and the billions in wasted productivity, instantly dig their heels in and cling to their mantra "our way or the highway."

This is exactly the attitude that has convinced me (and everyone that I influence regarding computers – a significant number) to give Apple a try about 5 years ago.

I think it also bears mentioning that Microsoft can't even get close to using a "SPAM" argument here. I'm not sure if it's still true, since I quit using Microsoft Hotmail years ago after the exact same circumstances. I had a Hotmail account and one day I started getting emails from Hotmail asking if I wanted to buy a BBQ grill and other items? WTF? I marked it as SPAM and tried to open up a dialogue with Microsoft. I never agreed to get these, I never signed up for them and yet Microsoft claimed that they weren't SPAM? How can that be? I even had a PAID version of Hotmail with extra storage and they felt that since they were "allowing" me to pay them for the use of Hotmail, that they had an inherent right to SPAM me. So, they forced me to try GMAIL which had an awkward interface at first, but I persevered and now of course I love it.

Years from now in business schools Microsoft will be the classic example of how arrogance can ruin a company – even one with a monopoly.

Ken

I'm blown away that end users want to label this as a problem that is only a big deal for marketers. Let's say you've signed up to receive a newsletter on your favorite hobby. In Jason's example above, you can't use Outlook and simply read the newsletter as it was intended - you've got to click through to read it on the web. Personally, even small little things that force me to do extra work make me mad. I'm definitely irked that in order to read my newsletters on Outlook, I have to fire up a browser and read the email in that. Frankly, considering the hundreds of dollars you pay for Office (and Outlook), I'd think you'd want it to work straight out of the box.

This is the funny thing about using Microsoft products – you get so used to working around the bugs that you actually get attached to them. Everybody defending Microsoft (with the exception of the security people) has basically said "Word isn't as good as regular HTML but not by much so let's just use Word." Again, I'm baffled - personally, I want the best experience possible. Why would you defend a company offering a sub-standard product?!

Interesting side note: I'm fascinated with the fact that since these guys chose Twitter as their method of delivering the message, many people completely disregard the message as a whole. Just goes to show that there's a lot of Twitter haters out there (marketers take note!).

1) Solicited. If you're sending out a newsletter to clients, people who know and trust you, they'll be willing to go the extra 2 clicks to display the email in a browser and everything is right in the world.

2) Unsolicited. Rot in hell, spammers.

You said it yourself "'Outlook 2010' was a top trending topic on the micro-blogging site Wednesday" I met MS is thrilled.

And if they get the community to fix it for them, free of charge.... bonus.

Now if people start getting e-mails back saying "I couldn't read your message" then that's the big issue.

Security-wise, well that's another story. It's one of the reasons why I abandoned Windows for Mac 3 years ago, and I went from having to deal with a virus a week to having had no virus infections in 3 years.

Every site you load each day is written in HTML and you're not getting tons of malware from them. HTML can be non-harmful if they spend more time making patching the holes in their product.