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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.
Microsoft actually has a case study up describing their Hotmail migration from FreeBSD to Windows 2000
Your link is a somewhat sanitized version of what happened, and ignores the first three years of fiascos.
Prior to the acquisition, Hotmail worked closely with the FreeBSD devs to optimize their servers. This led to things like the "sendfile" system call, where a program could pass a filename and an open socket to the kernel, and the kernel would write the file to the socket with none of the bytes touching userspace. So when Microsoft took over, they got a lean, optimized, and efficient system, and tried to replace it with one of the worst server operating systems ever. Each FreeBSD system (a $200 motherboard sitting on a piece of cardboard), needed 20 Win-NT servers to replace it, each costing ten times as much as the FreeBSD boards. Since this was clearly unworkable, they waited another 3 years to do the transition, while both hardware and software improved. All of this was further complicated by many of the original Hotmail people quitting to go elsewhere (this was the height of the boom), leaving the remaining employees just treading water with little time to work on the transition.
Just get your own domain and create throwaway addresses that you rotate on a regular basis. As a bonus, you don't have to change your actual email address if you switch providers or if your online email service provider goes under. Been doing that since '97.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I was the first SysAdmin for Hotmail. Everything you said is wrong.
The backend servers and mail servers were Solaris. The front end servers were FreeBSD.
The original code was Perl. This was before FreeBSD was rolled out. By the time FreeBSD was introduced, pretty much everything was coded in C.
The Windows migration was my last straw. They didn't perform worse on the front end, but the management was miserable and MSFT's Windows team were completely unsupportive until there was a massive flame going from my team up.
When the first real attempts to use Windows machines as Hotmail front end boxes was attempted ...
The first "real" attempt? Why the weasel word? What you mean is the first successful attempt after three years of abject failure.
the Windows servers were within 10% for raw performance.
That is not my recollection at all. I have some "before and after" photos of the Hotmail's Sunnyvale datacenter. I will try to find them and post a link.