Business model from Microsoft
Posted by Ashish on July 12th, 2005
Let me start by saying - I love Microsoft. I really do! Not only because I have worked at Microsoft but also because I think that they have given a lot to the software industry, in general. The software industry owes a lot to Microsoft for its current standing. But, in this post, I am going to talk about something that has annoyed me a lot in the past few days.
My annoyance is about the behavior of Hotmail for the past few days. A couple of weeks back - the first thing I noticed was that they stopped showing number of un-read emails in a folder. Temporary glitch? - that is what I thought initially! But, no, that was not it - apparently Microsoft decided that the users don’t need this functionality. Does that go well with anybody? I don’t know - I haven’t met anybody who was happy at that. Then the latest stuff - a week back - they pulled out the sorting by field (name, subject, date, etc) functionalities. Why? I have no clue! No, I refuse to believe that it is a performance issue.
What kind of business model is this? You provide a feature to users that they rely so much on and then you pull it out, all of a sudden. I have so much of dependency on Hotmail that I will have to go to the extent of even paying for the service if they stop the free service. But no, this is not something that affects only the non-paying users like me - this affects even those who have the premium membership.
Does this suck? Oh yes, big time! I don’t think that even a single day passes when I am not annoyed because of this. I am relying more and more on the desktop email clients but would still love to have these features in the web version. After all, that is what was unique about Hotmail, when it started.
July 12th, 2005 at 4:49 pm
I totally agree with you. Hotmail still has a 2Mb limit while there isn’t anyother e-mail provider that provides such meagre email space, no wonder Indians who haven’t been to the US hate Hotmail.
I believe Google is gonna be a great competitor for Microsoft, even I am a Microsoft fan, but offlate it’s Google that attracts me.
July 12th, 2005 at 11:22 pm
Best thing about Hotmail is that it provides access from Outlook Express. If you configure your Outlook Express client for your Hotmail account, you will get all these features along with many others.
As far as hotmail size is concerned, people can use the trick explained in this blog to increase it up to 250 MB
http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/bharath/archive/2005/01/05/41579.aspx
July 13th, 2005 at 8:31 am
Well it is not b-model , it is cheap tactics that MS is not play very well.
Lock-In the user on product and its feature and then extract the most out of them once they are hooked.
July 13th, 2005 at 10:19 am
> I think that they have given a lot to the software industry, in general.
> The software industry owes a lot to Microsoft for its current standing.
What make you say so. Take a look http://www.kmfms.com/whatsbad.html.
July 13th, 2005 at 10:19 am
Something about Micro$oft
Microsoft could not resist the power of Linux. microsoft.com is running on LINUX.
Checkout the This Report
Thanks Ankit Malik for the link.
Here you can find out Why Microsoft is so bad.
do check it out.
…
July 13th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
Kirti - The 2 MB limit was a news to me, as well! So, if they have increased the size to 250MB only for the US folks - that is clearly something wrong. But you should try Manoj’s trick to increase the size. Not to say that 250MB is a lot - I am about to reach the max there.
Manoj - Of course, I can get all the functionalities through an email client - but I do want to have those functionalities in the web-version also. I don’t want to set-up a email client at all the machines I might be using.
Rajan - I don’t think that it’s even a money making tactic because they have pulled out this feature even from the premium accounts.
Nazim - if you google even further - you will see a similar page which talks about all the good things about Microsoft. Dunno which one to believe and which one to not. There are so many forces / companies who focus a lot on de-stabilizing Microsoft but have failed. Doesn’t this tell you something?
July 17th, 2005 at 5:50 am
Yes you are right! Sorting .. expensive? We are talking of mails for a single user with a 2MB limit!! With each mail taking a single byte this means ~ 2*10^6 mail “records” .. can be sorted in the blink of an eye
Maybe its just another bug
August 24th, 2005 at 10:33 am
[…] I had written a post about my Hotmail woes a few days back but continue to use the service, though I am relying more and more on my company email account now. What makes me write this post today is an email in my Inbox from Hotmail Staff with the title “Connect to Friends with Hotmail”. Being a social networking fan, I was immediately drawn to this email and clicked open to read it (I seldom read any emails from Hotmail Staff, otherwise). […]