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How Hotmail Changed Microsoft (and Email) Forever (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Twenty years ago this week, on December 29, 1997, Bill Gates bought Microsoft a $450 million late Christmas present: a Sunnyvale-based outfit called Hotmail. With the buy -- the largest all-cash Internet startup purchase of its day -- Microsoft plunged into the nascent world of Web-based email. Originally launched in 1996 by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia as "HoTMaiL" (referencing HTML, the language of the World Wide Web), Hotmail was initially folded into Microsoft's MSN online service. Mistakes were made. Many dollars were spent. Branding was changed. Spam became legion. Many, many horrendous email signatures were spawned. But over the years that followed, Hotmail would set the course for all the Web-based email offerings that followed, launching the era of mass-consumer free email services. Along the way, Hotmail drove changes in Windows itself (particularly in what would become Windows Server) that would lay the groundwork for the operating system to make its push into the data center. And the email service would be Microsoft's first step toward what is now the Azure cloud.
Former Microsoft executive Marco DeMello, now CEO of mobile security firm PSafe Technology, was handed the job of managing the integration of Hotmail as the lead program manager for MSN -- Microsoft's own answer to America Online. In an interview with Ars, DeMello -- who would go on to be director of Windows security and product manager for Exchange before leaving Microsoft in 2006 -- recounted how, right after he was hired in October of 1996 to manage MSN, he was summoned to Redmond for a meeting with Bill Gates. "He gave me and my team the mission of basically finding or creating a system for free Web-based email for the whole world that Microsoft would offer," DeMello said.
Former Microsoft executive Marco DeMello, now CEO of mobile security firm PSafe Technology, was handed the job of managing the integration of Hotmail as the lead program manager for MSN -- Microsoft's own answer to America Online. In an interview with Ars, DeMello -- who would go on to be director of Windows security and product manager for Exchange before leaving Microsoft in 2006 -- recounted how, right after he was hired in October of 1996 to manage MSN, he was summoned to Redmond for a meeting with Bill Gates. "He gave me and my team the mission of basically finding or creating a system for free Web-based email for the whole world that Microsoft would offer," DeMello said.
Let's face it, hotmail is the worst freemail provider nowadays, with extremely unreliable deliveries and blatant non respect of RFCs.
Microsoft actually has a case study up describing their Hotmail migration from FreeBSD to Windows 2000. It's of course old and outdated, but may be an interesting read anyway. It made news back when Netcraft confirmed Windows 2000 servers running IIS were killing FreeBSD at Hotmail.
From the article:
That responsibility would include the somewhat delicate task of incorporating software running on Unix—a mix of FreeBSD Web servers on the front end and Sun Solaris on SPARC on the back-end—into a Windows-only environment and migrating the service to Windows servers.
At a time when Sun CEO Scott McNealy regularly made Microsoft's server operating system the butt of jokes, this was likely salt in the wounds of Microsoft executives.
Instead of bashing MS - constantly poking them in the eye and forcing them to take the enterprise seriously, if Scott McNealy had focussed on making the Solaris/SPARC stack even more competitive and further enhancing the vendor lock-in Sun had, today's enterprise duopoly might have been Solaris and Linux instead of Linux and Windows.
Don't bash your customers.
to fill a gap in its product line, and also to land young talent with a more up-to-date perspective on how things are done.
Never has happened before or since.
Mistakes were made. Many dollars were spent.
The most powerful weapon in the hands of the spinmeister is the passive voice. You can make reasonable sounding statements, keep who did the mistakes and who spent the dollars out of focus, lull the listener into some kind of mental lethargy, ... and then bham! Whack them before they know what hit them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
But only use it for a junk address.
"How about spam, eggs, long signatures and spam? That don't have much spam init."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
When ordering online requires an email address that the vendor can then spam the dickens out of, having some dummy hotmail spam collectors can be very useful.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
yes, in 1992-1993, the microsoft online services (MOS) group got started. and many of my colleagues headed there. i headed inwards and upwards, and finally outwards.. email at Hotmail was crazy, and NN 4.05 was cool along with Netscape Communicator... at msft only a few of us web developers were html 3.2 4.0 javascript compliant and most of the vps' were idiots telling us to us to eat our own dogfood, eg. Internet Exploder 3.0, 4.0, 4.01, etc.. well, long story short, the great ones like a few of us exited and watched ballmer like hotmail take 10 years to go away... did hotmail change the face of email? yes. did ballmer change the face of msft oh yes, and for the worse.. glad we are back on track. many of my msft friends who stayed on were underwater with options, until lately, too little too late... glad we can finally agree, 2000 to 2010 msft would like to forget... forever... happy new year... and gmail is good. yahoo is bad. brave is better than chrome, and firefox is better than edge. nn 4.05 nn communicator were the best in there time. pegasus was cool. eudora was cool too.. look at linux family tree in comparison... love that 3 way generations spawn of amazing universal collaboration.... -- happy new year... may your 1's and 0's be forever fuzzy...
I left hotmail after Microsoft bought it
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Hotmail is horrible, and Microsoft server in data centre is horrible. The only reason it floats is probably some form of enterprise kickback technology.
As long as Hotmail silently drops incoming, accepted mails without generating a bounce (blatantly ignoring SMTP RFC) it has absolutely nothing to do with email and should never be called that, the correct description is 'broken POS'. SMTP server admins should collectively blacklist them and move on into a better future.
When hotmail got taken over I switched to another provider with web and pop3 support, yifan.net I believe
was hotmail in that period tween BBS and webmail was a thing, successfully transitioned beyond that, lasted longer than hotmail in the picture of history, but yea hotmail, where every spammer I ever ran across got sent to a "eatmyass@hotmail, suckadick@hotmail, gofuckyourself@hotmail, fuckyourmamma@hotmail" response
hotmail was nothing special, in the sense that @aol.com was nothing special, unless you were 8 and completely clueless dumb fucks at the time
I was a hotmail user long before Microsoft bought it, gmail didn't exist back then.
I kept using hotmail even after MS bought it, I really didn't give it much tought.
Suddenly hotmail asked me to enter my cellphone number that they would verify with a message, and I could not log in without this verification.
That's how I lost years worth of emails and why I will never use Microsoft services again.
In the early years i was online (1996 - 2000 ) most web based email providers offered 25 MB of storage. Then google came and offered 2 GB with Gmail, which for me was the biggest leap i had seen. I mean companies used to charge for a 100MB plan. This has come at a privacy cost/penalty, though.
Many a time was hotmail typoed to hotmale leading to a very different website to what was expected.
"He gave me and my team the mission of basically finding or creating a system for free Web-based email for the whole world that Microsoft would offer," DeMello said.
Which sounds really impressive except 1) he got the idea from hotmail and other free services that already existed, this was obviously another "embrace, extend and extinguish" attempt and 2) the "whole world" meant people connected to the internet in 1996, not the billions we have today. The smartphone revolution wasn't even a fantasy in 1996 and even billy gates's wildest dream was only that we'd get as far as "a computer in every home" not one in every pocket.
I've had a hotmail account, since 1997. I use it for "junk mail". Anytime I have to log into any site with an email address...they get my hotmail address. Keeps the spam/junk out of my real email account.
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