Microsoft’s made a lot of strategic decisions when it comes to Windows RT and its Surface RT tablet, and those often have much less to do with what the hardware’s capable of, or what consumers actually want, and more about preserving the company’s image of how it want users interacting with these products. We saw a bit of that when covering the Windows RT jailbreak earlier this month, and the subject is coming up again now, upon hearing rumors that Outlook RT may be released for the platform.
Mary Jo Foley has heard from a number of her sources that such an app has been under development, offering more full-fledged email support than the native RT Mail app, but the company seems to be waging an internal dispute over whether or not it should ever be released. The Windows folks are apparently pushing to keep things the way they are now, or even rename the current Mail app to Outlook, while the Office team would like to see this “real” version of Outlook released.
For the moment, it sounds like the company is still considering its options.
