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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.
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
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.
I vaguely recall this. I still use my original hotmail address, had it since I was about 16 I think? I just turned 37.
"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.
I left hotmail after Microsoft bought it
Mendacem Memorem Esse Oportet
Don't forget the Christmas Hotmail went down because Microsoft forgot to renew the domain registration. They were lucky a Linux Hacker did if for them and got their service back up and didn't hold the domain for ransom.
That was and is bullshit. It only talks bout the migration of the Internet-facing machines.
The back end servers remained running *BSD for a long time afterwards. When they did eventually transition, it required compiled binaries (instead of php or perl or whatever was used in the original iteration of Hotmail) and much newer, more powerful servers to achieve the same performance.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Wasn't that the guy who did hold them up for ransom... to the tune of $10 or so (the renewal fee), and with the condition that Gates himself signed the check?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
Gates should have flown to England (iirc) and hand-delivered the ten dollar check personally - the dude saved Microsoft a fair bit of user embarrassment.
#DeleteChrome
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.
No. Microsoft neglecting the product to try and make $ off the user base is what killed Hotmail's reputation. And caused many of us to leave.
Bah. I had root@rocketmail.com and sysadmin@rocketmail.com.
We were a Solaris site from the start. Then a FreeBSD/Solaris site. And right after I left Hotmail was a Windows / Solaris site. A few years later, the last of the Solaris backend servers were retired.
Itâ(TM)s been awhile. That was Christmas 1999, I paid it for them. You can search google to read more, including the original threads.
Do you have ESP?
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
Hey Bill,
That's not true. When the first real attempts to use Windows machines as Hotmail front end boxes was attempted, the Windows servers were within 10% for raw performance. However, managing them was a clusterfuck of the first order. We were ahead of our time with code distribution, being able to take bad servers out of production, get new ones provisioned and the like.
We'd have needed 20x more sys admins, not 20x more servers.
The Windows team was not responsive to this problem until my team and I lobbed a nuke to Gates about how a conversion wasn't going to happen until the Windows team got their shit in order.
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.
Hotmail was a relatively small Sun customer. Remember that this was at the start of the .com boom, when all of the cool Internet startups were running Sun kit. They needed to bash Microsoft, because they were terrified that their customers would replace UNIX servers with NT servers on their corporate networks. To some degree, it even worked, given the number of companies that decided to migrate their servers to Linux/*BSD instead of Windows NT.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Wow, you even sold the Microsoft cheque for charity. Right on man, class act.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for posting this. It seems that Slashdot forgot their own news history yet again.
Zoid.com
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.
Slashdot link:
https://slashdot.org/story/99/12/25/114201/microsoft-hotmailpassport-service-interruptedupdated
https://slashdot.org/story/99/12/28/1729233/msft-thanks-linux-programmer-for-paying-35-fee
https://slashdot.org/story/00/01/18/1645224/microsoft-hotmail-domain-reward-check-on-ebay
And because those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it:
https://slashdot.org/story/03/11/06/1540257/microsoft-forgets-to-renew-hotmailcouk
Hotmail is not awesome - but it's just good enough to keep me using it as my primary e-mail.
I've had my account since the early days. Way back then it was great to have an e-mail address which stuck with you when you changed ISPs or changed jobs. These days there's a lot of competition but all my friends know my Hotmail address so unless MS really screw up I'll keep on using it.
Microsoft Server in the data centre is horrible, but it's got nothing on Microsoft licensing. I'm in the process of moving our infrastructure away from MS wherever possible just to avoid the dreadful morass of Server and CAL licensing. So far as I can tell, their explanations of licensing appear designed to confuse so that Microsoft can 'audit' at some point in the future and demand that we pay some punitive license settlement.
Just my current bugbear,
Keith.
and the many stories of how they tried to run it on Windows and it failed and eventually they went back to *nix/BSD and put a Windows based load balancer on the front end so that sites like Netcraft would list it as running on Windows.
Hotmail was possibly the one product Microsoft purchased which was originally a *nix product and were able to still provide service once it was ported to their Windows OS. The purchase of Danger comes to mind. Half a billion dollars or so and they tried to make it run on Windows on the handset and then tried to remake the service running on Windows and then just closed it down. But this wasn't the first time they took a successful product running on a competitors OS and shut it down at a massive loss. Dimension X and Coopers&Peters were a couple which pretty much got the lights turned off shortly after the ink dried. Gotta protect the Windows market.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
"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.
+1
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Thank you, but it gets better. The people I sold it to sent it back to me after taking pictures with it, so I still have the check. In 2006 or so I got a form letter from Microsoft that says "Hey, we were looking through our books and we wrote you a $500 check that never got cashed. We'll send you another one if you want." So, I still have the check, but I also got the $500. Plus, Bill Gates knows my name and probably still hates me, which is kind of cool.
Do you have ESP?
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.
We were profitable from the opt-in subscriptions "web courier" and ads we had. Not very profitable, but still better than pretty much the rest of the industry at the time.
Biil, don't be a douche throwing out a hostile term like "weasel word".to try and hide that you don't know what you're talking about.
For the record, I'm including when we looked at Windows NT in the 1997 time frame (pre-acquisition, but when some early conversations were happening) to see if it was feasible. It very much wasn't..But then, neither was Linux. Or a foolish attempt by a greybeard brought in late who wanted to port everything to Java. We tried lots of things to keep afloat and get off the bleeding edge.
As to the Sunnyvale data center, we had no such thing. We were colo'd at Best Internet (who had chicken wire and plywood separating their customers), and then we moved to Exodus's Wyatt and then Lawson facilities.
But you go find your pretty little pictures. I'll tell the real story of what happened.
Like when Exodus's PR folk did a photo shoot to show off our new cluster layout. Unfortunately, they used high intensity flashes, which EMP'd some of our gear.
This would be congruent with my recollections. During that time I worked for a Seattle-area reseller and we delivered dozens of Sun boxes to Microsoft. One day I was installing a few and ended up giving an ad hoc X-Windows tutorial to a roomful of people. They had no idea Unix had any sort of graphics capability.