The trouble with Hotmail

Microsoft can't seem to get its free e-mail act together. So what does that mean for the company's plans for total Net domination?

By Damien Cave

Aug. 21, 2001 | At first, Dave Miller didn't mind when Hotmail started treating him like a child. The 33-year-old software engineer had been using the Web-based e-mail service since 1995 -- two years before Microsoft purchased it -- and he'd grown accustomed to the outages and quirky malfunctions that occasionally afflicted his account.

It did seem a little bit odd that Hotmail would only allow him access to his e-mail after a "parent" logged in from another account and gave Miller permission, but he figured that the glitch was probably due to a recent redesign. He used another Hotmail account to approve his own attempt to get his own e-mail, and expected the Hotmail hiccup to be fixed in a matter of days.

But the problem persisted. Eventually Miller figured it out: In late July he had signed his daughter up for a children's version of Hotmail and Microsoft's Instant Messenger service; in the process, which he calls "inconsistent and confusing," he inadvertently kiddie-sized his own account.

"I set my birthday to hers -- June 29, 1996," he says.

Miller immediately shot an e-mail to Hotmail tech support, assuming that a representative could easily fix his "Passport," the log-in template that stores personal information for users of Hotmail and other Microsoft services.

Yet Microsoft told Miller his account couldn't be fixed. "I'm sorry to say this," came the reply from Redmond, "but we cannot change a child's account to a 'Regular adult/full' Passport account when you already gave consent to it."

No reasons were offered, technical or policy-based. The e-mail merely encouraged Miller to keep going through the convoluted process of giving himself permission "by using another parent account."

Miller, a software quality assurance expert, could hardly believe what he was reading. Microsoft's inability to simply change the age, or even delete and re-create the account, seemed ridiculous. Though perhaps not quite life-threatening in importance, to Miller the incident bore a significance that extended beyond your average software nuisance. If Microsoft's engineers couldn't fix an apparently minor problem with Hotmail, how much confidence should Net users place in Microsoft's much more ambitious plans -- with its much ballyhooed .NET initiative and HailStorm -- to absorb their online lives?

"These kinds of problems are indicative of slipshod design," he says. "They certainly say something disturbing about the entire .NET initiative."

Microsoft's .NET plan, which some observers see as part of a comprehensive strategy to battle AOL Time Warner for mastery of the online universe, is built on the premise that users will allow the consolidation of their personal information on centralized Microsoft server computers. The payoff is supposed to be "seamless" access to a vast array of online services. But to critics, the consolidation of e-mail, instant messaging and other goodies in the hands of Microsoft -- beyond, obviously, sounding antitrust alarms -- would make everyone more dependent on Microsoft's software infrastructure. And that infrastructure is already prone to virus attacks and other weaknesses that the rest of the Net has so far managed to evolve strong defenses against.

Microsoft representatives argue, in return, that Hotmail still works better than other Web-based e-mail services. Defenders of the company suggest that Hotmail's growing pains offer valuable lessons for Microsoft that will actually help .NET succeed.

But Dave Miller's Hotmail woes are hardly unique. In 1998, news traveled quickly around the Web of a method to steal Hotmail passwords; a year later, Microsoft paralyzed the service by forgetting to reregister the Passport.com domain name.

Meanwhile, outages have become commonplace, almost every-month occurrences -- and not just for Hotmail. Microsoft's Instant Messenger service -- which also uses Passport -- suffered a 10-day outage earlier this summer, and in late July, millions of users lost Hotmail access for several days after Hotmail's Windows NT servers were infected by the Code Red virus -- a problem that primarily affected Microsoft NT servers, and not computers running Linux-based or Unix operating systems or the Apache Web server program.

Microsoft's goal of becoming a one-stop shop for the entire Net is no secret. But is such a place, to paraphrase the company's own ubiquitous advertising slogan, really where we want to go today, let alone tomorrow?

Next page: Is Hotmail too hot to handle?