So... Um... Hotmail

Wow, I didn't realize how I've learned to start almost every sentence with "So..." and boy do I say "Um..." a lot. Well, if you want to see for yourself, I'm on Channel9 talking about Hotmail. Scoble was down back in November and he ended up interviewing me.

Next time we'll have to get more folks in there. Especially some of the folks on the Backend team (the guys that handle the 2 billion inbound messages, as well as the gobs of storage). Just to be clear, I am not The Lead Program Manager for Hotmail. I am A Lead Program Manager. We have 4 of us, and we all do various things. My team happens to own the "Hotmail Front Door Architecture". That means the code that spits out HTML, DAV, POP, SMTP, and a few dozen other kinds of servers. Aditya is also a PM on my team, and he is driving a lot of the new stuff we are building. There is also a User Experience Team that Reeves runs, a Business team and a team that managed the live site (not operationally) that Gil runs. For a while I was doing both the Architecture stuff and the Livesite stuff and it was kicking my butt. Hotmail is a complex system and there are lots of moving parts and lots of new code shipping to the site (most you won't notice). Each and every day we try and improve site efficiency and performance. The key is making those changes to a system with lots of moving parts w/o impacting any of the parts from being able to accept and deliver mail while processing user requests.

The other day an anonymous person sent me this email:

"You are a manager on Hotmail and you say nearly nothing about it. You talk of other things always. Well, it is interesting what you talk about but I would have liked much more about Hotmail as well. Currently Hotmail is not well regarded due largely to the advent of Gmail. Google have the touch of an innovator and atracts public opinion. Why don't you fix this? Make Hotmail better again please. Aren't you going to make some announcements for Hotmail. A better interface perhaps? An interface which is faster and allows better e-mail searches?
We want more info from you on Hotmail. If we don't get info from you who is a Hotmail manager, from whom are we going to hear about Hotmail. How are we going to love Hotmail again? Do you care ore about you programming projects? Or is MS happy that Hotmail is still popular and does not wish to improve or even talk about it?"

Since I obviously can't comment on what we are doing right now, all I can say is "Stay Tuned"... :-). I haven't been talking about Hotmail a whole lot for obvious reasons.