Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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What's more important, cool whizbang features or logging in every day and seeing the info you expect to see? While Hotmail Windows Live Mail has had it's share of problems over the years, one thing we've learned over time is that no mater what you do, if a customer logs in one day and doesn't see their email, nothing else matters at that point. It doesn't matter if the reason they lost their mail was because they didn't log in for the last x number of days before their account was deleted, or if a server blew up containing all their mail.
Trading off between investments in new stuff, and keeping the service running for your millions of users is not an easy decision. Sometimes you need to put things on hold and double up in your QoS efforts.
In fact, I remember a story some one told me a year or so ago. Over the holidays (when things were quiet at work) a man walked into our building in Mountain View hysterical that all his mail was gone. Luckily the receptionist got some one on our team to talk to him. In the end we were able to restore his mail . Don't ask me how.
I hope those 60 GMail users get their mail back (and hopefully it's only 60). It's probably not a fun time for the Googlers that are currently at the Googleplex figuring out how to undelete lots of deleted data.