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Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1998 14:38:46 -0500 (CDT)
From: Bill Wadley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Hotmail Success Bittersweet For Microsoft 06/03/98
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REDMOND, WASHINGTON, U.S.A., 1998 JUN 3 (NB) -- By Paul Lavin,
Newsbytes. Hotmail, Microsoft Corp.'s [NASDAQ:MSFT] World Wide Web-based
"freemail" service provider, says that it has been signing up new users
at a rate of 100,000 per day. This milestone was mentioned by Bill Gates,
Microsoft chief executive officer (CEO), at a database conference yesterday.
The service first achieved this feat May 19 and has passed America Online
[NYSE:AOL] as the world's largest e-mail provider with 15 million account
holders.
Gates' comments on the Hotmail service were in the context of
engineering problems presented by the growth of the Internet. He said
that getting devices to work together and making applications scalable
would continue to be a challenge.
Gates was speaking from Microsoft's experience in these matters.
Hotmail is run on Sun SPARC-powered servers using Solaris-brand Unix
and not on Intel nor Digital Equipment-powered servers using Microsoft's
own Windows NT.
According to a leaked internal report, Microsoft has been trying to
move the service over from the Sun/Solaris combination since it bought
Hotmail in December 1997. However, the demands of the rapidly growing
system have proven too great and NT has had to take a back seat.
The report, quoted by Network News, said "...its whole mail server
infrastructure is Solaris. NT couldn't handle it. On the Web server,
they're running MP Pentiums and Apache on FreeBSD. They're moving to
Solaris for threads. The engineering team did its best to run NT -- and
failed. The issue's being escalated."
Hotmail uses Apache's 1.2.1 Web server that is not available for NT due
to technical difficulties. A statement on Apache's Web site said: "The
road to Windows NT has not been a pretty one. Several attempts have
been made, both by Apache Group members and outside folks, but due to
a lack of stability and a clear consensus on how to manage a true
cross-platform development project, NT is not yet a standard platform
supported by Apache."
The latest beta release of the Apache Web server, 1.3b7, which is
available at http://www.apache.org , supports NT but is not yet
sufficiently robust to use on mission-critical servers like those
at Hotmail.
The Apache site cautions that the Apache on NT beta has not yet been
optimized for performance. Apache still performs best, it said, and
is most reliable on Unix platforms. Apache maintains, however, that over
time, it will improve NT performance.
Microsoft is recruiting engineers for Hotmail, but NT experience isn't
on the qualifications checklist yet. Hotmail's Web site lists vacancies
for operations software engineers and QA engineers -- and Unix
experience is the technical background preferred.
Reported by Newsbytes News Network: http://www.newsbytes.com .
-=-=-
ClariNet news now includes comprehensive news and photo coverage from the
Associated Press (AP), instead of Reuters material. You can expect even
broader and deeper news than before, with a shorter reporting delay.
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