3 ms·

Do you remember when they bought the first and largest webmail platform and did nothing with it?

• lagniappe 9mo ago
  "eh" https://www.wired.com/1999/08/hotmail-hackers-we-did-it/ https://www.wired.com/1999/08/hotmail-hackers-we-did-it/
• tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
  I seem to remember they spent years trying and failing to migrate it to .net.
  • yesbabyyes 9mo ago
    Not quite--this predates .net. They acquired Hotmail in 1997, while it was running on Solaris mail servers and Apache on FreeBSD for the web frontend. In a highly publicized move, Microsoft ventured to port it to Exchange and IIS on Windows NT. This went on for years on end, with MS claiming to have finished the transition several times, while getting egg on their face. Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000 and a combination of their flagship products and Windows Services for Unix (the WSL of those times). It has since been rebranded as MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Hotmail, and Outlook, likely with some 365 thrown in. Meanwhile, they have mismanaged their once great mail user agent Outlook Express, as well as their quite useful personal information manager Microsoft Outlook, to the point where their newest offering is absolutely unusable.
    • hulitu 9mo ago
      > Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000 The legend was that they tried and finally sticked with Freebsd, because Windows was not able to cope with the level of traffic.