On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 11:05:15AM +0800, Joshua San Juan wrote: > As to why they're not using their products on Hotmail - > maybe (speculating) they haven't finished their migration > yet? Or maybe (speculating again) their engineers did find > that using FreeBSD and other non-MS products (QMail?) was > the more effective solution.
The story is this (so that you can quit speculating :). A couple of years ago they posted a white paper on their web site detailing how they had migrated Hotmail to NT from BSD and it was so much better since they had, and they only had to use half as many machines (not very impressive considering that the BSD boxes were a couple of years old). Nobody paid much attention to it for about a year, and when they started ranting about open source being the work of the devil himself, some enterprising BSD'ers took a look at Hotmail. Indeed, they had replaced the front line machines (the ones which show you the login screen) with NT. But after you started logging in it redirected you to machines which were running FreeBSD. They called Microsoft's bluff. The computer press was on them like a swarm of bees, and they admitted that they were still using FreeBSD in some places but, by golly, they were working on getting away from it. They changed the white paper so that it wasn't exactly a big lie like it was before. When the DNS problems hit, word got out that they were also looking at more BSD solutions. They never did really come clean on why they were so inept as to not be able to make their own DNS work for two days. Say what you want about them. Windows XP does look nice. But I can't trust a company that takes two days to get DNS back online. Or can't figure out that hotmail is down because they forgot to pay the bill at network solutions. Or that took an entire week to get the MSN chat back up after a nasty crash. Any one of those incidents would make me seriously consider the ineptitude of a company that I would buy software from. All of them together make it clear that they don't have what it takes to provide the kind of service that I need to keep things running, and get them back online quickly if something does go wrong. Michael -- Michael Darrin Chaney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.michaelchaney.com/ _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
