Hotmail development team on Reddit • Hacker News Board

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#51

Post by samlevine » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:28 PM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #33

dstein wrote: post #20

The condescending attitude Microsoft has for users and developers can also be seen in their responses to Reddit's Q&A with the IE9 team: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_te...

Yeah, when I was at Microsoft we were really out to get the users and the developers. Are you fucking serious? I expect it at Reddit but not here.

Not that this is limited to Microsoft, but the poster suggested condescension and not malice. For example:

>>Does it work on my ubuntu laptop?

Dear iamnotobama - You may be surprised to hear that it actually does work on your laptop. It's a three-step process: 1.Install Windows 7 2.Install IE9, and 3.Enjoy the Beauty of the Web. ☺

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#52

Post by Locke1689 » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:29 PM UTC

dstein wrote: post #50

Locke1689 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when I was at Microsoft we were really out to get the users and the developers. Are you fucking serious? I expect it at Reddit but not here.

I didn't say MS was "out to get the users", I just mean that every response Microsoft has to perfectly reasonable questions like "why don't you support [insert standard here]?" has the same patronizing tone like "we've listened to our customers and delivered a product that they are satisfied with".

Example? They may be skirting around saying something straight out for legal reasons (either proprietary or getting sued by a competitor).

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#53

Post by primigenus » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:31 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #3

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…

This exact thing happened to me in 2005 - I lost 7 years of emails from high school, college, between myself and several girlfriends, chat logs I'd saved from IRC, photos, and other important notes. I was incredibly pissed and immediately stopped using hotmail for anything, including changing all my other accounts everywhere else to not use hotmail as a backup email address.

It was unbelievable to me then that they would delete your email after 30 (?) days of inactivity, and it's unbelievable to me now, especially after Gmail changed the game for them in 2004 by essentially saying that diskspace is a commodity and you can therefore store as much as you want with them (within reason) for as long as you want.

Sure, there are things in the ToS that cover Google's ass, but no Google engineer in his right mind would write code that automatically deletes someone's email after a predetermined (way too short) time period. There would be too many alarm bells going off in their head, they'd talk about it with the team, and they'd make the right call. Something tells me that with Hotmail, it was just an exec somewhere looking at a balance sheet and trickling an order down the waterfall so the revenue looks nicer.

Jaded, but goddamnit.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#54

Post by sukuriant » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:32 PM UTC

dstein wrote: post #20

The condescending attitude Microsoft has for users and developers can also be seen in their responses to Reddit's Q&A with the IE9 team: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_te...

Or are those responses as professional as they can make themselves sound? They didn't seem that arrogant to me, just very political and containing context. Microsoft is a HUGE company and it has gotten in trouble more than once for various things.

And, forgive me, but how are their responses bad? In particular, I found their response to why IE doesn't do silent updates to be incredibly acceptable! (not to mention if any browser were to pull a stunt like auto, silent updates, they'd be assaulted more, to no end)

"One of our principles with Internet Explorer and Windows is user choice; this shows up in many places including our approach to updates. We believe users are in the best position to make decisions about what software they want to run. IE is the most widely used browser including being the most trusted and widely used browser with businesses.

As you can imagine a hospital with a multimillion dollar patient tracking web based application doesn't want a silent or automatic upgrade to their browser that could in fact jeopardize their patient's safety. For consumers, we have Windows update which provides a simple notification that a new version of the browser is available and lets the user choose to install or not. Again, customer choice is our overriding principle." (from link)

Also, a question: what would you have wanted them to say? "No, because we'd get in trouble"? Or, "This is the situation. Because of this, we say no".

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#55

Post by larrik » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:34 PM UTC

thwarted wrote: post #27

larrik wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consultant, I ran into a LOT of people who preferred POP3 on their phones and non-main devices. They just wanted to have as little email on their phone as possible (which also gives you decent security if the phone is lost). Combine this with the fact that Outlook is just terrible with IMAP, and I didn't find too many regular users who liked it. Personally, I wouldn't use anything else, of course.

How does the choice of protocol determine if there is as little email on non-mail devices as possible? Also, I've seen people screw up POP3 configuration so the mail moves to the downloading device (because it gets deleted from the server after downloading, as they didn't choose the "leave mail on server" option). If your phone is continuously checking for and downloading mail, that less security in the event your ph…

True, looking back I forgot to include the part where they obsessively delete each email from their device after reading it.

The "Leave Mail" option is very important as well, especially when they really just want to leave the mail on the server long enough to get it on multiple devices (especially their main desktop), but the server has absurd size caps.

It's often a case of their expectations having already been set by their history with POP3, so anything working different is not what they want.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#56

Post by Locke1689 » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:35 PM UTC

samlevine wrote: post #51

Locke1689 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when I was at Microsoft we were really out to get the users and the developers. Are you fucking serious? I expect it at Reddit but not here.

Not that this is limited to Microsoft, but the poster suggested condescension and not malice. For example: >>Does it work on my ubuntu laptop? Dear iamnotobama - You may be surprised to hear that it actually does work on your laptop. It's a three-step process: 1.Install Windows 7 2.Install IE9, and 3.Enjoy the Beauty of the Web. ☺

In a previous comment iamnotobama mentioned dynamic programming -- clearly someone who knows that IE only runs on Windows. I think snark deserves snark back.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#57

Post by sudont » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:35 PM UTC

larrik wrote: post #8

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #5

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 believe that Microsoft is still insisting that IE6 and Windows are inseparable, due to that being their defense in the DOJ trial.

I think the WINE implementation on Linux and OS X says a few things about their defense.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#58

Post by dstein » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:35 PM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #52

dstein wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say MS was "out to get the users", I just mean that every response Microsoft has to perfectly reasonable questions like "why don't you support [insert standard here]?" has the same patronizing tone like "we've listened to our customers and delivered a product that they are satisfied with".

Example? They may be skirting around saying something straight out for legal reasons (either proprietary or getting sued by a competitor).

* Would it have killed you to have included a built-in spellchecker?

For IE9 we really focused on what customers, partners and developers told us mattered most, their sites. Developers wanted the ability to create richer and more immersive experiences on the web, and so we invested in fully HW accelerating HTML5 through Windows.

* Why no Websockets support?

We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used. In IE9, we set out to support the standards that showed up among those sites. We also spoke to developers and partners to understand what they were going do in the future and what they couldn't do today

... every answer is like this.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#59

Post by klbarry » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:37 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #16

GavinB wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I basically agree with you, but I'm guessing that the important thing isn't saving disk space, but freeing up usernames.

> but freeing up usernames. WHAT?! They do that? That's SO dangerous, and perhaps what made me lose a domain name three years ago! I registered a domain in 2001 with my hotmail account, and noticed in 2006 that the registration had changed to another person in Ontaio, Canada. My only guess as to how they did that (after much investigation) was that they must have accessed my hotmail account, which was dormant for pro…

100%. I had a friend in High School who liked to play Neopets (www.neopets.com). He would try out tons of old accounts with valuable pets on it, trying to see if they had guessable hotmail usernames. 1/10 times they did and he got the accounts and had the passwords sent there.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#60

Post by dflock » Fri, Dec 10, 2010, 5:40 PM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #35

cryptoz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but freeing up usernames. WHAT?! They do that? That's SO dangerous, and perhaps what made me lose a domain name three years ago! I registered a domain in 2001 with my hotmail account, and noticed in 2006 that the registration had changed to another person in Ontaio, Canada. My only guess as to how they did that (after much investigation) was that they must have accessed my hotmail account, which was dormant for pro…

Yup, I think user accounts are recycled. It's got its benefits and its downsides. I think it will be interesting to see 80 years from now. I guess non-recycled usernames will just get more esoteric?

Yeah, there are a lot of characters in the full unicode set.