81–90 of 122 posts
Some good lessons about PR can be learned here. For one, don't use your normal marketing tone/marketing speak in a candid Q/A session like this one. The IE9 AMA and this AMA have done more to make me lose respect for Microsoft than anything else I've seen from them (although, I should note that I'm not old enough to have been around in their true "evil empire" style days). If they would actually answer questions hone…
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It's not a conscious decision to be hostile, just an effect of Microsoft's cultural norms and attitudes.
It's really not. Do you actually know any Microsoft developers? It's just impolite for people at Microsoft to say: "Reddit says it wants this feature but we haven't implemented this feature. Why? Because we have done a massive user study in the past year on this and there are fewer than 1% of users (power users only) who actually care."
If you talk to users, very few will care that IE doesn't support key web standards that every other major browser does, because everyone is going to make things work on IE anyways. However if you talk to users, lots care that it is easy to develop rich web content. However the users don't have the perspective to understand that standards support will get them better web content.
Therefore IE decides that better standards support is not a priority. And doesn't implement it.
Conversely if IE did decide to implement better standards support, everyone would be better off.
However Microsoft wouldn't get much credit for it, because it wouldn't be obvious to users how important Microsoft's role was in making things better. And developers would say, "Finally!" But then curse Microsoft for years anyways because it takes that long to get the old, broken, browsers off of the market.
The result? IE is crap. And will remain crap. Indefinitely. And Microsoft is convinced that this is not a problem. (And for them it isn't - except for the also invisible problem that they have developed hiring problems in part because many good developers can't stand that attitude.)
I hope the Hotmail team follows through with answering questions. When the IE team offered to answer questions on Reddit, they quit after a few hours. The questions I had asked was (summarized): Most IE6 usage seems to be from large corps, and much of their resistance to upgrading is due to internal apps which only work correctly on IE6. Why doesn't Microsoft offer a standalone IE6 distro which could be installed alo…
I've often wondered why these companies don't install a non-IE browser as a primary browser, leaving IE6 on the system, then using HTAs ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496%28VS.85%29.... ) with IE6 to deliver their intranet stuff.
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"If you go help in an aid program in Africa for a while, you could come home to find 10 years of email deleted." That is more insulting. We have Internet here so you can check your mail.
My girlfriend is going on a Field Study program with a Canadian university. She will be there for five months and have "very little" Internet access. She's forbidden from bringing her own computer, and the 40 students share a professor's laptop. Sure, there's Internet all over Africa. It's one of the most connected continents, at least with mobile. But people going on programs there, from the West, typically don't ge…
Why? That seems horribly broken.
I found the much more insulting thing on that thread was the Hotmail developers' insistence that user's emails should be deleted after 270 days of inactivity. This point was brought up many times (well, about the old 30-day or 90-day limits), and all the devs said was "we fixed that! it used to be 30, now it's 270". That is so incredibly insulting. If you go help in an aid program in Africa for a while, you could com…
Sorry, I may not have explained this very clearly: Exchange was crashing because it held too much mail. I have no idea how many terrabytes were involved, but there fewer than 10,000 employees at the time.
I know everyone is going to say that Exchange and Hotmail are completely different code bases, but what they have in common is Microsoft's vision of what people do with email and how they do it. I'd say that deleting old mail is in Microsoft's DNA.
I hope the Hotmail team follows through with answering questions. When the IE team offered to answer questions on Reddit, they quit after a few hours. The questions I had asked was (summarized): Most IE6 usage seems to be from large corps, and much of their resistance to upgrading is due to internal apps which only work correctly on IE6. Why doesn't Microsoft offer a standalone IE6 distro which could be installed alo…
Companies with these locked down Win2K/XP/ie6 desktops wouldn't install that, because that would be work, which costs money. If they saw ie6 as a problem and were willing to put in any effort whatsoever to fix it, they would have done so long ago.
They are now atoning for past sins. I don't think they understood what a pickle they were getting themselves into a few years ago by saying, "Our in-house apps target IE6, our corporate standard browser". Also, they have vendor contracts which do not state, "We guarantee isolated product upgrades to support Microsoft's current browser" or similar. This isn't to say that they shouldn't have been more forward looking -- it's just the reality of the situation.
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My girlfriend is going on a Field Study program with a Canadian university. She will be there for five months and have "very little" Internet access. She's forbidden from bringing her own computer, and the 40 students share a professor's laptop. Sure, there's Internet all over Africa. It's one of the most connected continents, at least with mobile. But people going on programs there, from the West, typically don't ge…
She's forbidden from bringing her own computer Why? That seems horribly broken.
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There's no such thing as bad press. I've read the name "Hotmail" more times today than I had in the past 6 months.
Yes but all of it is in negative connotation. The replies on the thread are downright insulting. Take this for example - http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ej32l/we_are_the_hotma... I think the Hotmail team shouldn't have done this, at least not before putting all the basic features in place.
you can turn off the page you see before the inbox if you want by going to options. many people like this because they see highlights of your inbox / networks in one spot. but understand if you don't -we often default logout to MSN since that's where many users come from. However this is something that we always look at.
Guys, if your market it people who go to MSN to find the link to their email or through Outlook you shouldn't be surprised that the people of reddit don't like your product.
I think this was a negative PR move. Did they really think coming on reddit and saying things like this would be beneficial? I don't see any evidence in this that they actually care about peoples feedback. They just keep getting defensive about their decisions of deleting peoples email, not supporting IMAP etc.
There's no such thing as bad press. I've read the name "Hotmail" more times today than I had in the past 6 months.
I found the much more insulting thing on that thread was the Hotmail developers' insistence that user's emails should be deleted after 270 days of inactivity. This point was brought up many times (well, about the old 30-day or 90-day limits), and all the devs said was "we fixed that! it used to be 30, now it's 270". That is so incredibly insulting. If you go help in an aid program in Africa for a while, you could com…