Hotmail development team on Reddit • Hacker News Board

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#111

Post by macmaxbh » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 8:55 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #109

ry0ohki wrote: post #95

It's pretty sad that Hotmail is trying to reach out to the tech community, and their comments and getting so far down voted on Reddit (-500 for one comment at time of writing this)

I dislike the downvoting too, but there's a reason for it. People are raising valid critiques about Hotmail (that the Hotmail team specifically asked for!) and their only response was "well, why would anyone want all of that anyways?" They're clueless, that's why they're getting downvoted. Re: their complete and utter cluelessness when it comes to IMAP support, someone basically summarized up the reasoning in a singl…

Yes, because they're actually talking about Exchange ActiveSync. http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...

EAS is a protocol specifically for mobile phones, and Android, iPhone, Palm all support it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Exchange_ActiveSy...

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#112

Post by benologist » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 9:20 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #108

ars wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I meant. Email should be kept forever. I meant if you don't log in for a year they can delete the account.

I disagree. I can see them freezing the account - i.e. rejecting further mail to it. But if I come back after a year, I fully expect to be able to say "hey guys, I'm back, can I have my emails now?" and get at it. Data storage is ludicrously cheap that I don't understand why there's a need at all .

Data storage is ludicrously cheap unless you cater to more people than most countries have. Years of email times 10s or 100s of millions of people probably isn't that cheap.

Drop Box reserves the right to delete free accounts after just 90 days. Is that unreasonable? Hell no. I bet they don't hold your stuff forever in case you do pay that overdue bill one day too.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#113

Post by kunjaan » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 9:55 PM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #43

jey wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

You are tarnishing the MS reputation by being so pushy.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#114

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 10:30 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #81

jokermatt999 wrote: post #61

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…

They sent a marketer to do a developer's job."

If you observe their history carefully, you will see they do it all the time.

I have worked with Site Server 3 in the late 90's and I can assure you no sane developer would have created such a monstrosity. That was, probably, the work of a marketer.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#115

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 10:45 PM UTC

joblessjunkie wrote: post #30

twymer wrote: post #23

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.

[deleted]

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#116

Post by dflock » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 11:41 PM UTC

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #78

dflock wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I consulted for a company which had well over 10K managed desktops with XP/IE6. They are in the process of upgrading to IE8 and would be delighted if they could just install it in place of IE6 and go on with life. However, the upgrade team identified well over 70 internal apps, some written in-house and some vendor-provided, which required IE6 to function properly. Some suitable strategy must be identified for each:…

If you were Microsoft, it would be trivial, provided you hadn't based your legal anti-trust defence on saying this was impossible. If you had, for example, done that, then it's obviously 'impossible'. Also, their revenue model only works if they can keep selling you upgrades all the time - no profit in fixing the old shit.

There a lots of pieces of 3rd party software that mess around with IE in ways that MS have claimed are not possible and go part of the way towards what you want:

Uninstall IE from Windows: http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html

Have multiple stand-alone versions if IE installed: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE, http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage, http://blog.donavon.com/2009/08/run-ie6-ie7-and-ie8-side-by-...

Virtualise your way out - run different versions of IE in VM's: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...

Once you can run multiple versions of IE on the same machine, and you're controlling which browsers are installed, redirecting traffic to one or the other is just matter of a simple browser plugin on both that has a black/whitelist and redirects to the appropriate browser. Done. Ms could get an intern to code this up, if they actually wanted to.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#117

Post by pkamb » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 11:42 PM UTC

Regarding branding: I had a huge "woah" moment a couple months ago when I realized (via wikipedia) that hotmail = HoTMaiL = HTML.

Not sure how much cash would be involved in that acquisition, but @html.com would be a cool rebrand that I think tech-minded people would appreciate.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#118

Post by drlew » Sat, Dec 11, 2010, 1:13 AM UTC

on hotmail delivery stops after 270 days account expires after 1 year. this doesn't mean there isn't room to improve.

its 270 day expiration for gmail, I believe.

not sure for others

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#119

Post by Locke1689 » Sat, Dec 11, 2010, 5:45 AM UTC

kunjaan wrote: post #113

Locke1689 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

You are tarnishing the MS reputation by being so pushy.

No, I'm just insulted. What jey is essentially saying is that I'm incompetent and condescending, but it's not my fault because I worked at Microsoft. That's patronizing and I'm not sure how you don't see that.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#120

Post by ShabbyDoo » Sat, Dec 11, 2010, 7:41 PM UTC

dflock wrote: post #116

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consulted for a company which had well over 10K managed desktops with XP/IE6. They are in the process of upgrading to IE8 and would be delighted if they could just install it in place of IE6 and go on with life. However, the upgrade team identified well over 70 internal apps, some written in-house and some vendor-provided, which required IE6 to function properly. Some suitable strategy must be identified for each:…

If you were Microsoft, it would be trivial, provided you hadn't based your legal anti-trust defence on saying this was impossible. If you had, for example, done that, then it's obviously 'impossible'. Also, their revenue model only works if they can keep selling you upgrades all the time - no profit in fixing the old shit. There a lots of pieces of 3rd party software that mess around with IE in ways that MS have clai…

I had not considered Microsoft's legal need for consistency with statements made in past anti-trust cases. Was the company's argument that IE was not extricable from Windows or that Windows could not function without a tightly-integrated browser? I had thought the argument was the latter, and, if so, I don't see why Microsoft could not provide IE6 as a stand-alone browser while leaving IE8/9/whatever tightly integrated with the OS.

"Also, their revenue model only works if they can keep selling you upgrades all the time"

I think the need for IE6 hurts the velocity of Windows 7 upgrades, especially for large accounts.