{"id":564,"date":"2004-09-29T16:48:49","date_gmt":"2004-09-29T16:48:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/2004\/09\/29\/BizarreTechSupportTechniques.aspx"},"modified":"2004-09-29T16:48:49","modified_gmt":"2004-09-29T16:48:49","slug":"bizarre-tech-support-techniques","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/2004\/09\/29\/bizarre-tech-support-techniques\/","title":{"rendered":"Bizarre tech support techniques"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><P><A href=\"http:\/\/www.hotmail.com\">Hotmail<\/A> is a really big service &#8211; servers measured in the thousands, active users measured in the hundreds of millions, incoming mail measured in the billions.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not cheap to run (yeah, we&#8217;re <A href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\">Microsoft<\/A>, cry you a river).&nbsp; To keep our costs down we don&#8217;t make it easy to e-mail a human directly to get technical support and as a result users get (understandably) frustrated.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>Enter Reeves, fearless, rogue cowboy PM, roaming the uncharted wastelands of the net searching for <A href=\"http:\/\/www.hotmail.com\">Hotmail<\/A> users in need.&nbsp; I spend tireless hours combing the dark corners of the net looking for&#8230; <\/P><br \/>\n<P>OK, I don&#8217;t even believe myself.&nbsp; What I do is set up <A href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/alerts\">Google alerts<\/A> to drop me an e-mail once daily when news reports mention <A href=\"http:\/\/www.hotmail.com\">Hotmail<\/A>.&nbsp; My primary interest is to find out what reporters are saying about Hotmail but I occasionally&nbsp;find gripes mixed in with the news.&nbsp; Last week, for example,&nbsp;I came across <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20041217221522\/http:\/\/www.impactwrestling.com:80\/content.aspx?snum=3341\">a pro-wrestling reporter who had to re-write his weekly article because he was unable to get into his Hotmail account<\/a>.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>Since I&#8217;m not in support the only ways for me to be able to help people with <A href=\"http:\/\/www.hotmail.com\">Hotmail<\/A> is to post info on my blog, free-lance by tracking down gripes on the web or (crazy thought here) to proactively design new features for Hotmail which make it easier to use &lt;gasp&gt;.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>So, as always, if you have a gripe about <A href=\"http:\/\/www.hotmail.com\">Hotmail<\/A>, e-mail me.&nbsp; I love to hear compliments about our product but hearing complaints is the next best thing.&nbsp; Coming up with brand new stuff is hard&#8230; fixing stuff we broke is easy, if we know it&#8217;s broke(n).<\/P><br \/>\n<P>P.S.&nbsp;it appears <A href=\"http:\/\/www.hotmail.com\">Hotmail<\/A> is becoming <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20041217222331\/http:\/\/www.impactwrestling.com:80\/content.aspx?snum=3370\">a regular topic in the industry news<\/a>&#8230; I wonder if I&#8217;ll get a chance to meet The Rock.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hotmail is a really big service &#8211; servers measured in the thousands, active users measured in the hundreds of millions, incoming mail measured in the billions.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not cheap to run (yeah, we&#8217;re Microsoft, cry you a river).&nbsp; To keep our costs down we don&#8217;t make it easy to e-mail a human directly to get [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,16],"tags":[89,101],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-techhotmail","category-techmicrosoft","category-tech","tag-techhotmail","tag-techmicrosoft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}