5.8.07
roots
8 May 2007
by
bn
Filed under
geeky
the official windows live hotmail launch was monday.
a lot of very talented developers put a lot of long hours to make this specific release happen. i have the privilege of working with many of them and am frequently impressed by their desire to ‘do the right thing.’ this is one of the reasons i love my job.
i’ve worked for microsoft for 7.5 years and had something to do with hotmail that entire time. i’ve seen many many talented people have a profound effect on the service we run. many (most, in fact) have moved on, inside or outside the company. some have gone back to school, some have moved north to redmond, some have left to work for other companies, and a fair number have left to pursue careers with our competitors.
it wouldn’t be right to congratulate the current product planning, customer support, business, marketing, dev, and ops teams on this major release and re-branding of hotmail without highlighting the incredible legacy left by their predecessors. there are hundreds of people who’ve worked on hotmail over the past 11+ years, most of them will go unrecognized. hotmail works, in part, because of a number of very wise decisions that were made many years ago.
congratulations to all of you who used to work on hotmail. any success we have is partly your doing.
13 May 2007 @ 5:48 pm
Huzzah! Hotmail would look distinctly different and probably smaller were it not for Jack’s overnight re-write of Apache, called “Hotmail’s Not NFS” (and later Jim’s XFS) and Scott’s scary code called MSERV. For the record, I could go the rest of my life without having to look at the several thousand lines of krufted together script that built several thousand front doors. May Kickstart forever rust in peace.