Mighty BOB!

January 09, 2011 at 8:37pm

Silly Justin, who uses Hotmail?

thljcl

January 09, 2011 at 3:47pm

I never expect a perfect service from any person or corporation. Serving over a billion customers worldwide, Microsoft is rather good in maintaining a high quality service for last couple of years. This incident affects over 17,000 accounts, which represents a very tiny percentage over the total amount of Hotmail inboxes, which are well over a billion. I’m not one of the affected users. Even if I was, I don’t jump to conclusion too quickly but rather closely observe what Microsoft would do in handling the potential issues.

No, Microsoft does apologize to affected users. It’s clearly stated in the blog post you mentioned. It DOES not apologize to most users because most users are simply not affected. It does, however, tell everyone that it will take steps to prevent same incident from happening.

Occasional issues do not tell the overall reliability. It does tell the responsiveness and responsibility of Microsoft. Admittedly, being the largest email service provider on earth, it’s rather difficult to discover issues quickly, if the issues are not widespread. The blogosphere, well often presents the half-truth, does help Microsoft to look into various rare incidents, further enhancing the reliability of the service. Nevertheless, Microsoft should not count on unjustified claims to improve its service. It its blog post, it does say that it has changed its way to monitor the overall reliability so that this type of incident can be discovered more quickly and easily.

This incident, which is due to unfortunate human error, does bring some benefits to Hotmail users. While bring inconveniences to tiny percentage of all Hotmail users, Microsoft does realize the weaknesses in the previous method of monitoring the reliability of Hotmail services. No data was lost in this incident.

It’s not really as bad as many people wanted it to be. You will never know the reliability of other company until they are too reach the size of Microsoft in providing email services.