On December 29, 1997, Bill Gates bought Microsoft a $ 450 million Christmas gift later this year: a Sunnyvale-based costume called Hotmail....
On December 29, 1997, Bill Gates bought Microsoft a $ 450 million Christmas gift later this year: a Sunnyvale-based costume called Hotmail. With the biggest buy-and-buy of cash online - Microsoft has plunged into the new world of web-based email.
Started in 1996 by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia as "HoTMaiL" (referring to HTML, the language of the World Wide Web), Hotmail was originally classified as Microsoft's MSN online service. Mistakes have been made. Many dollars have been spent. Brand has been changed. Spam has become a legion. Many, many terrible email signatures have been born.
But in the years that followed, Hotmail will set the course for all Web-based email services, followed by the launch of the era of free email services for consumers. Along the way, Hotmail has drove itself to change in Windows (especially what will become Windows Server), which will provide the basis for the operating system to accelerate its operations into the data center. And the email service will be Microsoft's first step towards what is now the Azure cloud.
Former Microsoft chief executive Marco DeMello, now CEO of mobile security firm PSafe Technology, has been tasked with managing Hotmail integration as the main program manager for MSN-Microsoft's answer. America Online. In an interview with Ars, DeMello, who will be the director of Windows for security and product management for Exchange before leaving Microsoft in 2006, said after he was hired in October 1996. To manage MSN, he was called to Redmond to meet Bill Gates. "He gave me and my team a mission of making a basic search or creating a free Web-based email system for the world that Microsoft will provide," DeMello said.
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In 1996, the Web continued to gain traction. Almost all personal Internet access is via dial-up services such as AOL, MSN, CompuServe and EarthLink. Luckily, there are high-speed Internet services sooner than ISDN connections, but many companies do not even connect their corporate email systems to the Internet. Although there are several Web-based e-mail services available from ISPs that are integrated into Web hosting accounts, Lotus has demonstrated a web interface to cc: Mail in 1994, Hotmail and Rocketmail. (later to become Yahoo Mail) are the first to offer free, web-based email sponsored by advertising. By 1997, Hotmail had 9 million users.
"I said it clearly, and obviously," DeMello said, "that we could not build our email service during Bill's appointment." Buying an existing service is the only real option - although one of Microsoft's executives is unpopular, who often follow the policy of "eating our dog food."
But finally, "Bill wrote the check for $ 450 million," DeMello said. "And I was given the responsibility to integrate that system and extend it in Microsoft."
Locks the seller
That responsibility will include sophisticated software that combines software running on Unix-a combination of FreeBSD Web servers on the user interface and Sun Solaris on SPARC in the back-to-Windows environment and migration. service to Windows servers.
Windows NT Server did not perform this task in 1997. Although the DeMello team has developed a number of interfaces for the Windows environment for the Hotmail platform, "We are a Windows Server client," he said. Our head is not very happy customer. "
Despite the pressure to immediately move code to Windows, DeMello said, "There are a lot of things that we're embarrassed-from security to memory management, and all the ways to manually connect to the TCP network - that's all. I'm comparing - this is what we get from Unix, this is what we get from NT and this is why we can not move it yet. No, we can not move yet. ' "
At a time when Sun's chief executive, Scott McNealy, routinely put Microsoft's server operating system into laughter, it could be salt in the wounds of Microsoft executives. Changing "nope" to "yes" will take three years and the development of Windows 2000 Server. DeMello worked with [Windows NT Architect Dave] Cutler and the crew at the time, "DeMello recalled," first about the scalability - we're talking about the Internet Information Server, and the stack network, and TCP stack and memory and how it is managed - as well as the security of accessing local directories right from the execution. Eventually Cutler and his team were able to pull it off.
The relationship between Microsoft's server development team and the Hotmail team will continue for years, especially for the development of IIS, the Windows Web and Web services component. "We will have the builds generated to test IIS-Hotmail as an experiment," DeMello said. "The mantra is that if it passes the Hotmail test, you can tell it to anyone - it has become a stress test for IIS."
Hotmail's activity has given Microsoft the opportunity to "eat your dog food" when it comes to everyday experiences. Web-based services from around the world believe DeMello reflects how Microsoft runs today's Azure Cloud. "It's an infinite kind of information about what to do, not what is best-practices, worst practices, what works and what does not," he said. He said, "from the minutes response time problems on the log all the way for you to handle the large data transmission."
Although the transition to Windows Web servers has occurred before, the backend system of Hotmail-the database servers and storage-did not even begin to migrate to Windows Server and SQL Server for to 2004. The move is becoming increasingly burdensome as demand for storage increases, because there is a limit on how quickly it can be transferred from one account to another and transferred through data centers.
Hotmail also leaves a mark on the Office platform - aside from being Outlook.com's predecessor. The first version of Outlook came just weeks after the acquisition of Hotmail, and the next version-Outlook '98 - was modified to work with Hotmail - leading to a war on protocols. DeMello said, "[Outlook] has used MAPI as a protocol, and he described MAPI over TCP / IP as" one of the hardest things ever invented, so we had to change it to Back to WebDAV directly then we had some problems, let's say that way - which protocol must win the protocol war. "
The pain of experience
The move from Solaris to Windows took three years to complete. DeMello said "the Bill Gates message from above" is "You do not have to take a single mailbox" and we did not do that. "There are still some pain on the way.
Scaling up to cater to millions of users means expanding the data center that can handle storage and computing needs of Hotmail. Store away from cheap. "We have to deal with the cost of hard drives," DeMello said. "You have to remember that we're talking about 1997 in 2000 ... you still have to pay with each megabyte - forget it. gigabyte. And so the cost of infrastructure is a staggering bill. "
And those data centers are expensive and lack the power. "I recall when we actually completed a new data center, built in Bothell [Washington]," DeMello said. "We started testing it - and the first day we tested Saturn, we caused a power failure at Bothell. I had to answer a member of the city government very angry in the morning After and we pulled it off the second time - no force was raised, and people were ready for it and braced for it and expected the city to be licked with fire, but it was not occur. "
Then, in the summer of 1999, Hotmail was the first major security breach. One of the Hotmail accounts - about $ 50 million - could be exposed by a bug in a script on Hotmail servers that allows access to any Hotmail account with the same password: eh ".
The Gateway Web site surfaced using exploits to allow people to access the mailbox by just entering the targeted account name. Some people said they had access to the account through this error nearly two months before Microsoft patched it. Some suggest that it is a backdoor caused by a Hotmail developer.
DeMello will not comment on the violation. "I can tell you, but I'll have to kill you," he joked. However, he said that Hotmail has always put security and privacy - at least as well as the reality of the end of the millennium. "We have put a lot of effort and effort into security and privacy," he said. "I think we built the system from scratch to focus on security and privacy."
In 1999, it meant doing two special things, DeMello said. "We tried to protect the credentials and password policies that were enforced, and we wanted to send users about the need to protect their passwords and make it clear that email is not the way to go. We have warned never to share or send any personal or financial information or confidential information by email. "
Hotmail uses Secure HTTP (HTTPS) with SSL encryption to protect user credentials, and Microsoft forces customers to use more complex passwords, but the rest of the service runs over unencrypted HTTP. "Just a piece of certification requires us to run hardware acceleration at the time." And it costs a hefty thousand dollars for every card you have to run whether you use Unix. or Windows Server. You can not operate the entire infrastructure at that time via SSL "
DeMello said that changed when servers ran development servers - and today, "it's impossible to run something with HTTP directly."
The password policy has been set up to prevent customers from using passwords that are too short or (starting in 2011) too common. However, Hotmail has a password length limit of 16 characters, so there is a ceiling on the complexity of those passwords.
So while someone is listening to a coffee shop's Wi-Fi network may not necessarily be able to sniff out passwords, it's still possible someone can read your Hotmail messages by capturing traffic. Web access after login.
The stigma of the user for Hotmail
The competition from Google's Gmail and from Yahoo forced Hotmail to get better, but it also triggered some strange brand. In an attempt by Microsoft to make MSN more alive during the launch of Windows Vista in 2005, Microsoft has tried to redeem itself for services such as "Windows Live." Hotmail was renamed "Windows Live Mail". However, Hotmail users seem to have been confused, so they changed it again - to Windows Live Hotmail. As well as rebranding, Microsoft has begun rewriting the entire front-end system for Hotmail, which previously was essentially the port of the original Solaris code in C ++ and Perl. The rewrite, in C # and ASP.NET code, has finally put an end to the Unix effect of Hotmail, and for better or worse, making this service an exhibition for Microsoft platforms - set up the company on a course towards the Office 365 and Azure cloud platform.
Although Hotmail is important to Microsoft as a testing platform for many things - and perhaps less important as a revenue generator - it also gains a reputation in some areas as root. of all the bad things on the Internet. Hotmail users are the butt of common jokes and haters for years. A management consultant publicly stated that companies should not hire people who use Hotmail.
Hotmail is the land of the scammers for fake forgeries. As a pioneer in HTML email, Hotmail users are a natural target for phishing and phishing attacks. Its spam filtering capabilities are the best. Ironically, Hotmail does not have the ability to block spam that causes Hotmail accounts to be blocked as spam - in part because of all bouncebacks caused by full mailboxes.
So, despite all the good things we can credit Hotmail with the same help, there is not much reason to mourn its passing. Outlook.com forgets the old days of webmail easier ... and still thousands of people are too lazy to opt out of keeping their Hotmail.com address.
