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"Fun" fact: Outlook today still uses Word to render HTML, which is about as capable as IE3 released in 1996.

It's not that simple. It used to have a more capable renderer, they rolled it back to the Word one (no animated GIFs!) and have since upgraded again. So Outlook 2007-2016 is really crappy, versions before and after that, a bit less so.

The lovely world of enterprise software.

Your use of the word "still" is a little misleading. IE _was_ the default email rendering engine until 2007 when Microsoft made the inexplicable decision to move to Word 2007 instead.

Outlook is part of Office; Word is part of Office.

IE, and now Edge, is a different business unit.

Not inexplicable at all. NIH doesn't only apply at corporate boundaries.

My theory is still that it was about using Word as a component to write replies. However, if they delayed the HTML->Word conversion to that point, everyone would complain to MS "Reply is broken!"

By using Word as a viewer the email is broken right on delivery and users now complain "The email you sent me is broken!"

At least it's still better than Notes

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