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The Summer of Love

Hotmail Plus is finally live, a high-point in the Hotmail ‘summer of love’ to our customers. After X weeks of long hours working with some really dedicated people, we’ve shipped our 2GB paid/250MB free offer. For full details, check out this site on when we’ll be upgrading folks and all that stuff. Putting this out there was a wild and awesome ride. For about the last month of this process, I didn’t leave work before 9pm, was working at least 12 hours a day (well, something like 12 in the office and probably a few more from home before and after work) and on at least two occasions didn’t leave until 2:30am (once to fix this XSS vulnerability and the other to fix a registration hole that let people get free 2GB inboxes).

Such a wild ride working for a service — the registration hole is a great example. We first caught wind of it by reading about it on Neowin, a Microsoft enthusiast site on Wednesday. Within a hours site like Fat Wallet, Ben’s Bargins, Slick Deals, etc had all picked up on it and gave the repro steps. The crazy part is the actual steps — it involves using the MSN Explorer client, version 7 (the version that ships with Windows) to sign up for a free @msn.com account. The loophole is was that we incorrectly stamped those users with 2GB, and so we fixed the bug so that we give them the correct storage allotment. What blows me away is how users hit our service from every interface possible. It’s amazing how comprehensivly users push our software. Great stuff, and I’m glad I’m a part of it.