9 ms·

We haven't instantly forgotten how Microsoft handles Skydrive, have we?: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265086 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265086

by rickmb 14y ago

We haven't instantly forgotten how Microsoft handles Skydrive, have we?: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265086 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265086 I think I'll pass on putting my email through their systems. Although I have to admit this looks way better than GMail. I hope this inspires Google to do something about their interface design.

blhack 14y ago
And I'm going to hope and pray that google stops screwing with their interface design. Gmail was perfect.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Good luck with that. SAAS means you're vulnerable to vendor change with every pageload. Though there are getting to be tools which allow you to reverse-engineer sites and design them how you want, but this is subject to a lot of churn keeping up with the SAAS vendor. Still lovin' my mutt.
  - pyre 14y ago
    True, but it would be nice to augment Mutt with things like tags and conversations[1] without having convoluted setups involving hacks with external scripts. Another example, it would be really cool to be able to edit email as Markdown/Textile/reStructuredText and have it converted to a text+html (multipart/alternative) email, but currently there is no way to do that with Mutt without using some sort of sendmail wrapper that does this. [1] I realize that Gmail's threading isn't 'true' threading, but I'm talking about pulling in the entire thread even if it's not part of the current email folder.
    - petercooper 14y ago
      Not pointing this out for any reason other than it might useful for some: http://sup.rubyforge.org/ http://sup.rubyforge.org/ More generally, though, I last used mutt in the late 90s so I have no clue but.. it doesn't allow for a vim-style of extension by third party addons?
      - xiaomai 14y ago
        I used sup for many years (and contributed some very minor patches). sup is no longer maintained and it's difficult to get running with ruby 1.9. Some good people that weren't happy with sup created notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/) with similar goals. There is a mutt fork that uses morning called mutt-kz (https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz/wiki https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz/wiki). I'm not as satisfied with mutt-kz as I was with sup, but it's probably even better if you have invested a lot of time configuring mutt just so.
  - skeletonjelly 14y ago
    On the flipside, SAAS means you can augment the interface using browser plugins (user scripts, CSS, etc)!
    - ohhnoodont 14y ago
      That's a characteristic of applications that run in a web browser and has nothing to do with SAAS architecture.
- bijupunalor 14y ago
  You can get back the old UI using "old gmail" userstyle (http://userstyles.org/styles/57755/the-return-of-old-gmail http://userstyles.org/styles/57755/the-return-of-old-gmail) and a few tweaks such as turning off chat. This only works in chrome or firefox. One complaint I've heard, a lot .. almost everyone thinks new gmail UI is butt ugly. But it's also very functional. My parents were long time yahoo-mail users, who switched a few months ago. They love never having to delete mail in order to tidy, terrific spam detection etc. My dad uses filters and archiving, but my mom has a huge inbox and only ever searches. This dichotomy between searching and labeling is an on-going debate in the family :)
- aik 14y ago
  >> Gmail was perfect. Comments about perfect technology keep popping up on hn. I would think that claiming any technology is "perfect" is a little self-defeating coming from a tech startup news site? The very core of what we all stand for here is advancing mankind (or making the world a better place) through whatever means we are capable (most often technology). Viewing existing technologies as "perfect" closes the mind to the possibilities of better solutions. I wonder how many times throughout history someone has claimed some piece of technology is perfect, and the same person 10 years later chuckles at the thought of having actually used the now-antiquated and clearly-inferior technology.
  - alphakappa 14y ago
    You are probably being too abstract here. What you are saying is true as a general statement, but in Gmail's case, it's big draw was its simple, fast and clean interface that stood as a stark contrast to hotmail and yahoo. The storage it offered was bound to be matched by others soon, but the Ui design was something that could have used incremental feature improvements, not the drastic Web 2.0 treatment it received. Today's gmail interface is hard to use and is slow. Very arguably a far cry from the perfection it seemed to be in 2004.
    - aik 14y ago
      I agree it was good, and probably better in the past just because it was faster and less cluttered. But this attitude: >> I'm going to hope and pray that google stops screwing with their interface design. I don't agree with, and this is part of what I was addressing as well. I hope they do continue screwing with their interface design, but obviously I rather hope and pray that they improve it rather than make it slower and more cluttered. It doesn't make sense for me to happily use Google products and simultaneously fear that if they touch them they will make them worse. They are the owners of the product, so either I trust that they have some competency or I look elsewhere.
  - balac 14y ago
    "Perfect", especially in terms of UI is extremely subjective. I personally prefer the new Gmail design.
- RexRollman 14y ago
  I understand how you feel, as I feel the same way about Gmail (and about Twitter too). If there is one bad thing about using someone else's platform, it's that they can change it whenever they want.
briandear 14y ago
I use my old mac.com and new me.com emails and it works beautifully. The iCloud mail interface as well as everything else about the experience is just great. Very, very little spam, lightning fast, no ads, integration with my iCal and therefore easily accessed from all of my devices. Gmail is good, but I find it's overrated.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  IIRC, it's not free.
  - hwatson 14y ago
    It is now.
    - rbanffy 14y ago
      Again? Wow!
- sjm 14y ago
  Interesting. I've had issues with a me.com email — for seemingly no reason at all it will say I'm providing the incorrect password. Seems to happen every other week at random intervals.
kmfrk 14y ago
You needn't look any farther than Hotmail to grow wary of the merits of their new service. And there's the whole Skype brouhaha. Microsoft have an edge over Google in that they aren't perceived to be as morally bankrupt, when it comes to privacy and protecting their users (because they earn their money elsewhere), but with the Skype criticism, that may be subject to change. It's a nice flank of attack to use against Google, though, and the video ad in the submission hits all the right notes.
- 1010011010 14y ago
  Offering a contrary opinion: Microsoft is definitely morally bankrupt. I don't trust them at all.
- huggyface 14y ago
  because they earn their money elsewhere? This is a terribly odd statement. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that they can shaft their customers because many of them have, or at least had, few alternatives. Google might make a lot of its money on advertising, but it wouldn't make a penny if it didn't have the trust and respect of its customers.
  - iy56 14y ago
    Yes it would. Neither I nor anyone I know use Google because we trust or respect it, we use it because it works well.
    - niels_olson 14y ago
      I'll bet there are some smart, hard-working, upstanding googlers here that read that and felt a little sad.
      - jbigelow76 14y ago
        And conversely so with Microsoft employees and similar criticisms. Nobody likes to the think they work for The Man or some kind of corporate tyrant, most truly believe they bringing value to the lives of their users as opposed to exploiting them (even incidentally). Google is just as susceptible to trust issues as Microsoft or anyone else. Every time Google is caught violating privacy it's always an "accident", like with the wifi network data collection being done by their street view cars. If a company is constantly apologizing for "accidents" that align with their business interests I'd have a hard time trusting them, even if I continue to use them.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
It's not just SkyDrive. They also actively filter evil links out of your email. You know, like http://piratebay.se/ http://piratebay.se/.
- quotemstr 14y ago
  > They also actively filter evil links out of your email. You know, like http://piratebay.se/ http://piratebay.se/. They do? I was able to send myself several test messages containing this link.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    Dug up the link and...doh! It was Live Messenger[1]. Right company, wrong product; but I think the point holds. 1. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120326/04530718244/microsoft-spying-live-messenger-messages-censoring-any-pirate-bay-links.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120326/04530718244/micros...
    - nsmartt 14y ago
      Humorous mistake of a similar nature: I recently tried to link to a post about Skype becoming more susceptible to policing when it had previously been far more resilient. Messenger warned me that the link was dangerous. After a few minutes I discovered that it was the ow.ly service that was flagged as "dangerous" rather than the blog post. I was losing my head for a few minutes.
zethraeus 14y ago
It would indeed appear that since outlook is also a Live product, it follows the same code of conduct banning nudity. There's no reason to assume that they wouldn't scan the service similarly. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/code-of-conduct http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/code-of-cond...
mandeepj 14y ago
This is what Microsoft is saying now - Putting you in control. Email is private and confidential, and most folks we've talked to want to keep it that way. So we keep your personal email personal. We don't scan your email content or attachments and sell this information to advertisers or any other company, and we don't show ads in personal conversations. We let you decide whether to connect your account to social networks, and which ones you want to use - and you're in control of who you friend or follow. And, if you're a power user who wants to really fine tune your inbox, we let you create your own categories, folders, and rules to tailor Outlook.com to your preferences.
- codeka 14y ago
  > We don't scan your email content or attachments and sell this information to advertisers or any other company They're saying they don't scan your email to sell information to advertisers, that doesn't mean they don't scan it for violations of their T&C's. Mind you, even this statement is pretty FUD-like since Gmail also doesn't "scan your email [...] and sell this information to advertisers".
mtgx 14y ago
I know I haven't. It's more than just one "whoopsie" though. It happened with Windows Live messenger and TPB before. It's happening with Skype, and all the non-transparency regarding to what type of agencies they give user data, how easily they do that, and so on.
emmapersky 14y ago
Hmmm, I'm not a fan of the outlook.com design in any what so ever. The fonts are messy, the buttons are in all the wrong places, the icons don't mean anything to me. It feels like a weekend hackathon project not a commercial enterprise.
georgemcbay 14y ago
As a big Android/Google fan, I can't say they are exactly innocent when it comes to the sort of thing Microsoft was called out for with Skydrive. When Google+ first came out quite a lot of people lost their "Google lives" (including their gmail accounts they had been using for years) when Google banned them for being under 13 or using a pseudonym.
- rlu 14y ago
  Also wasn't there some controversy a few months ago (perhaps march? random guess) where someone lost their google life because of some adwords dispute? I think the issue got resolved because he was lucky enough to be a nerd which a blog that got picked up by HN/Techmeme etc. and then someone from Google personally fixed the problem. Most users would have been hosed. It also doesn't help that Google has no "real" customer support other than forums. As a user it would be extremely uncomfortable to lose your Google life and have no phone number to call. At least you can call Microsoft. Whether they can do anything about it is a different story but it at least will escalate easier, or at least I would imagine
- magicalist 14y ago
  The under 13 thing, as has been discussed before, is due to COPPA. Google doesn't offer anything like hotmail's family account (where the child's account is managed by a proven parent's account), so if they find out that you're under 13, they have to close your account and they aren't allowed to warn you that they will do so (or let you go back and change your birthdate). As for the pseudonym thing, that never occurred. People lost their google+ accounts, but the rest was just forum posts saying things like, "I remember reading about someone..." without providing the actual citation.
  - antidoh 14y ago
    No, they don't have to close the account, they choose to, rather than deal with the law's requirements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr... > While children under 13 can legally give out personal information with their parents' permission, many websites altogether disallow underage children from using their services due to the amount of paperwork involved.

by rickmb 14y ago

blhack 14y ago

And I'm going to hope and pray that google stops screwing with their interface design. Gmail was perfect.

dredmorbius 14y ago
Good luck with that. SAAS means you're vulnerable to vendor change with every pageload. Though there are getting to be tools which allow you to reverse-engineer sites and design them how you want, but this is subject to a lot of churn keeping up with the SAAS vendor. Still lovin' my mutt.
- pyre 14y ago
  True, but it would be nice to augment Mutt with things like tags and conversations[1] without having convoluted setups involving hacks with external scripts. Another example, it would be really cool to be able to edit email as Markdown/Textile/reStructuredText and have it converted to a text+html (multipart/alternative) email, but currently there is no way to do that with Mutt without using some sort of sendmail wrapper that does this. [1] I realize that Gmail's threading isn't 'true' threading, but I'm talking about pulling in the entire thread even if it's not part of the current email folder.
  - petercooper 14y ago
    Not pointing this out for any reason other than it might useful for some: http://sup.rubyforge.org/ http://sup.rubyforge.org/ More generally, though, I last used mutt in the late 90s so I have no clue but.. it doesn't allow for a vim-style of extension by third party addons?
    - xiaomai 14y ago
      I used sup for many years (and contributed some very minor patches). sup is no longer maintained and it's difficult to get running with ruby 1.9. Some good people that weren't happy with sup created notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/) with similar goals. There is a mutt fork that uses morning called mutt-kz (https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz/wiki https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz/wiki). I'm not as satisfied with mutt-kz as I was with sup, but it's probably even better if you have invested a lot of time configuring mutt just so.
- skeletonjelly 14y ago
  On the flipside, SAAS means you can augment the interface using browser plugins (user scripts, CSS, etc)!
  - ohhnoodont 14y ago
    That's a characteristic of applications that run in a web browser and has nothing to do with SAAS architecture.
bijupunalor 14y ago
You can get back the old UI using "old gmail" userstyle (http://userstyles.org/styles/57755/the-return-of-old-gmail http://userstyles.org/styles/57755/the-return-of-old-gmail) and a few tweaks such as turning off chat. This only works in chrome or firefox. One complaint I've heard, a lot .. almost everyone thinks new gmail UI is butt ugly. But it's also very functional. My parents were long time yahoo-mail users, who switched a few months ago. They love never having to delete mail in order to tidy, terrific spam detection etc. My dad uses filters and archiving, but my mom has a huge inbox and only ever searches. This dichotomy between searching and labeling is an on-going debate in the family :)
aik 14y ago
>> Gmail was perfect. Comments about perfect technology keep popping up on hn. I would think that claiming any technology is "perfect" is a little self-defeating coming from a tech startup news site? The very core of what we all stand for here is advancing mankind (or making the world a better place) through whatever means we are capable (most often technology). Viewing existing technologies as "perfect" closes the mind to the possibilities of better solutions. I wonder how many times throughout history someone has claimed some piece of technology is perfect, and the same person 10 years later chuckles at the thought of having actually used the now-antiquated and clearly-inferior technology.
- alphakappa 14y ago
  You are probably being too abstract here. What you are saying is true as a general statement, but in Gmail's case, it's big draw was its simple, fast and clean interface that stood as a stark contrast to hotmail and yahoo. The storage it offered was bound to be matched by others soon, but the Ui design was something that could have used incremental feature improvements, not the drastic Web 2.0 treatment it received. Today's gmail interface is hard to use and is slow. Very arguably a far cry from the perfection it seemed to be in 2004.
  - aik 14y ago
    I agree it was good, and probably better in the past just because it was faster and less cluttered. But this attitude: >> I'm going to hope and pray that google stops screwing with their interface design. I don't agree with, and this is part of what I was addressing as well. I hope they do continue screwing with their interface design, but obviously I rather hope and pray that they improve it rather than make it slower and more cluttered. It doesn't make sense for me to happily use Google products and simultaneously fear that if they touch them they will make them worse. They are the owners of the product, so either I trust that they have some competency or I look elsewhere.
- balac 14y ago
  "Perfect", especially in terms of UI is extremely subjective. I personally prefer the new Gmail design.
RexRollman 14y ago
I understand how you feel, as I feel the same way about Gmail (and about Twitter too). If there is one bad thing about using someone else's platform, it's that they can change it whenever they want.

briandear 14y ago

I use my old mac.com and new me.com emails and it works beautifully. The iCloud mail interface as well as everything else about the experience is just great. Very, very little spam, lightning fast, no ads, integration with my iCal and therefore easily accessed from all of my devices. Gmail is good, but I find it's overrated.

rbanffy 14y ago
IIRC, it's not free.
- hwatson 14y ago
  It is now.
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    Again? Wow!
sjm 14y ago
Interesting. I've had issues with a me.com email — for seemingly no reason at all it will say I'm providing the incorrect password. Seems to happen every other week at random intervals.

kmfrk 14y ago

You needn't look any farther than Hotmail to grow wary of the merits of their new service. And there's the whole Skype brouhaha. Microsoft have an edge over Google in that they aren't perceived to be as morally bankrupt, when it comes to privacy and protecting their users (because they earn their money elsewhere), but with the Skype criticism, that may be subject to change. It's a nice flank of attack to use against Google, though, and the video ad in the submission hits all the right notes.

1010011010 14y ago
Offering a contrary opinion: Microsoft is definitely morally bankrupt. I don't trust them at all.
huggyface 14y ago
because they earn their money elsewhere? This is a terribly odd statement. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that they can shaft their customers because many of them have, or at least had, few alternatives. Google might make a lot of its money on advertising, but it wouldn't make a penny if it didn't have the trust and respect of its customers.
- iy56 14y ago
  Yes it would. Neither I nor anyone I know use Google because we trust or respect it, we use it because it works well.
  - niels_olson 14y ago
    I'll bet there are some smart, hard-working, upstanding googlers here that read that and felt a little sad.
    - jbigelow76 14y ago
      And conversely so with Microsoft employees and similar criticisms. Nobody likes to the think they work for The Man or some kind of corporate tyrant, most truly believe they bringing value to the lives of their users as opposed to exploiting them (even incidentally). Google is just as susceptible to trust issues as Microsoft or anyone else. Every time Google is caught violating privacy it's always an "accident", like with the wifi network data collection being done by their street view cars. If a company is constantly apologizing for "accidents" that align with their business interests I'd have a hard time trusting them, even if I continue to use them.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

It's not just SkyDrive. They also actively filter evil links out of your email. You know, like http://piratebay.se/ http://piratebay.se/.

quotemstr 14y ago
> They also actively filter evil links out of your email. You know, like http://piratebay.se/ http://piratebay.se/. They do? I was able to send myself several test messages containing this link.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Dug up the link and...doh! It was Live Messenger[1]. Right company, wrong product; but I think the point holds. 1. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120326/04530718244/microsoft-spying-live-messenger-messages-censoring-any-pirate-bay-links.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120326/04530718244/micros...
  - nsmartt 14y ago
    Humorous mistake of a similar nature: I recently tried to link to a post about Skype becoming more susceptible to policing when it had previously been far more resilient. Messenger warned me that the link was dangerous. After a few minutes I discovered that it was the ow.ly service that was flagged as "dangerous" rather than the blog post. I was losing my head for a few minutes.

zethraeus 14y ago

It would indeed appear that since outlook is also a Live product, it follows the same code of conduct banning nudity. There's no reason to assume that they wouldn't scan the service similarly. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/code-of-conduct http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/code-of-cond...

mandeepj 14y ago

This is what Microsoft is saying now - Putting you in control. Email is private and confidential, and most folks we've talked to want to keep it that way. So we keep your personal email personal. We don't scan your email content or attachments and sell this information to advertisers or any other company, and we don't show ads in personal conversations. We let you decide whether to connect your account to social networks, and which ones you want to use - and you're in control of who you friend or follow. And, if you're a power user who wants to really fine tune your inbox, we let you create your own categories, folders, and rules to tailor Outlook.com to your preferences.

codeka 14y ago
> We don't scan your email content or attachments and sell this information to advertisers or any other company They're saying they don't scan your email to sell information to advertisers, that doesn't mean they don't scan it for violations of their T&C's. Mind you, even this statement is pretty FUD-like since Gmail also doesn't "scan your email [...] and sell this information to advertisers".

mtgx 14y ago

I know I haven't. It's more than just one "whoopsie" though. It happened with Windows Live messenger and TPB before. It's happening with Skype, and all the non-transparency regarding to what type of agencies they give user data, how easily they do that, and so on.

emmapersky 14y ago

Hmmm, I'm not a fan of the outlook.com design in any what so ever. The fonts are messy, the buttons are in all the wrong places, the icons don't mean anything to me. It feels like a weekend hackathon project not a commercial enterprise.

georgemcbay 14y ago

As a big Android/Google fan, I can't say they are exactly innocent when it comes to the sort of thing Microsoft was called out for with Skydrive. When Google+ first came out quite a lot of people lost their "Google lives" (including their gmail accounts they had been using for years) when Google banned them for being under 13 or using a pseudonym.

rlu 14y ago
Also wasn't there some controversy a few months ago (perhaps march? random guess) where someone lost their google life because of some adwords dispute? I think the issue got resolved because he was lucky enough to be a nerd which a blog that got picked up by HN/Techmeme etc. and then someone from Google personally fixed the problem. Most users would have been hosed. It also doesn't help that Google has no "real" customer support other than forums. As a user it would be extremely uncomfortable to lose your Google life and have no phone number to call. At least you can call Microsoft. Whether they can do anything about it is a different story but it at least will escalate easier, or at least I would imagine
magicalist 14y ago
The under 13 thing, as has been discussed before, is due to COPPA. Google doesn't offer anything like hotmail's family account (where the child's account is managed by a proven parent's account), so if they find out that you're under 13, they have to close your account and they aren't allowed to warn you that they will do so (or let you go back and change your birthdate). As for the pseudonym thing, that never occurred. People lost their google+ accounts, but the rest was just forum posts saying things like, "I remember reading about someone..." without providing the actual citation.
- antidoh 14y ago
  No, they don't have to close the account, they choose to, rather than deal with the law's requirements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr... > While children under 13 can legally give out personal information with their parents' permission, many websites altogether disallow underage children from using their services due to the amount of paperwork involved.