Omar Shahine's WebLog : Hotmail

When the work you do is architectural (MSN mobile messaging)

omars — Sun, 15 May 2005 02:09:42 GMT

The other day I had an experience with my computer, and MSN's software that just made me smile. You see, for the past year or so folks on my team have been involved on a feature that took coordination from dozens of internal teams. This was a big feature, one that I have spent countless man hours involved in, and some of my directs and co-workers an order of magnitude more time working on. It took everything from sharp technical minds, good business practice, relationships with carriers, partners, and of course operations, user experience folks and the usual suspects for any feature (development, testing, program management).

For the first time ever, I was able to use this feature with my sister, and I felt empowered. It's the kind of feature that makes me so proud to work here because I fully understand the complexity of what we did, and the simplicity of the feature to the customer. It's really my favorite kind of work, and it's incredibly satisfying to have been a *small* part of it.

So what is this feature? Let me first explain the scenario.

Today, when two people have SMS enabled mobile phones, it's possible to send an SMS (Short Text Message) from one phone to another phone. This is a fairly old system that was built years ago and was initially a hallmark of the GSM mobile phone system pioneered in Europe. Many years later we finally have SMS between all sorts of different carriers and technologies and in most cases it works world wide.

SMS requires a lot of inter carrier technology, billing support, and queuing technology. It's a widely popular system and something I use a lot to communicate with my friends and family.

Now we also have this MSN Messenger thing which allows you to do many of the same types of things between two users sitting in front of a computer. Today it's not a queued system but one that requires both sides be "online" at the time. So if I want to send a short message to some one who is not signed into MSN Messenger I have two choices: to send them an email, or to wait till they return online. In many cases my communication is not appropriate for email as a communication medium, and if I wait, I might forget about it. The current system does not allow me to continue the conversation with the person (even though that person may have a mobile device capable of having a text based conversation).

In the past few years there have been an effort to port the IM stacks to mobile devices to enable the same experience as the PC. However, there are millions of mobile devices that do not have IM stacks, and even if they are available, it's sometimes too cumbersome to sign in to the mobile IM stack. Finally, that system suffers from the same problem as MSN Messenger on the PC. The communications require both parties be online.

So what to do? Enter MSN Messenger to SMS communications (we call this Enhanced mobile messaging). The feature we've been working on for the past year (or longer) was to allow a user of MSN Messenger on a PC to send a message to some one that is not signed into MSN Messenger but has an SMS enabled Mobile device AND to reply to that SMS message and have a real time chat (in otherwords, a two way conversation between MSN Messenger and Mobile phone using SMS as the wire protocol). This last part is important, but to understand it I need to explain one more thing.

For the past few years part of the scenario above has been available through what I will call a hack. Most phones that have SMS also have an email gateway that can take a message sent to a special email address and forward that message to the phone. For example, an email sent to <phone number>@mmode.com will forward that message via SMS to the <phone number> of an ATT Wireless subscriber. However, the user cannot reply to that email enabling a 2 way chat. Furthermore, it breaks the SMS user experience that mobile phone users are used to.

So, to fix this we set out to build all the necessary carrier infrastructure, SMS infrastructure, and build the technology and carrier relationships to ship the ability for users to have a two way conversation from MSN Messenger to a Mobile device that has nothing more than SMS capabilities (practically every singe phone on the planet). Not only that, but we support "Offline messages" so that if a Mobile phone device replies to an SMS from Messenger, and you have signed out of MSN Messenger, the next time you sign in the message will be delivered to you allowing you to continue the conversation. This is EXACTLY the same experience you get with a Mobile phone since it can queue SMS messages if your phone is off, and always deliver them when the phone is on. Now we have the same capability in MSN Messenger, and I'm happy to say that this is possible because of Hotmail's participation (we are the store for all these offline messages, as well as delivery of the messages to Messenger). As a result of all this, two days ago, when my sister was "offline" from MSN Messenger, I was able to have a conversation with her from my Desktop PC and I had no idea where she was. That is super powerful and empowered me to do something that was not previously possible, and something I wanted and makes sense to me as an end user. One of the many reasons I love building software.

I write this because a lot of what I do at Hotmail is this kind of work. This isn't a big splashy feature with a lot of chrome. But it took some super hard work from so many people across Microsoft, and shipping it is really a testament to how we can build interoperable features across organizations, technologies and overcome numerous obstacles to deliver something that makes a lot of sense to our users :-). This feature is particularly interesting as well due to the numerous SMS billing models world wide. In the US we have Recipient Party Pays (the person receiving the SMS gets billed) and in many other countries Calling Party Pays (where you must pay a small amount of money to send the mobile IM from Messenger to the SMS device). These two models are negotiated with the different carriers depending on the prevailing business model in that market. Today in the US this feature works for Verizon and T-Mobile users. It's coming soon to other carriers near you.

You can read about how to use this feature in the mobile messaging help topic.

On Shipping Software

omars — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 06:35:00 GMT

Mark Luckofsky's post is sure making its rounds on the web and inside Microsoft. Joshua Allen posted some of the most insightful comments in reaction to that post. I don't think I could have said it better myself.

You know, when I joined Microsoft we shipped software every few months. Outlook Express shipped at least 4 versions in my first year at Microsoft. I got to ship version 5.0 which was probably the most fun I ever had, and went on to claim about 60% of the Macintosh e-mail market. Then OS X came out, Apple shipped Mail.app and the rest was history. Off into Office land we went, shipping every 18-24 months. Watching Longhorn the past few years, I can understand how many of Mark's points are valid. However.... that is one of the main reasons I came to MSN. In case you haven't been paying attention, MSN is shipping a lot of software. Both Win32 bits, and web bits. I think over the next few years you are only going to see an increasing amount of stuff come out of MSN. What you see today is really the beginning. MSN has gained quite a bit of credibility inside Microsoft for succesffully shipping software, and increasing revenues. We are competing in a super competitive market place, with Google and Yahoo shipping some really great stuff.

Anyway, I love to ship software Mark, and that is why I'm working on Hotmail. A bunch of my old Mac buddies, Dick Craddock, John Tafoya, Michael Fullerton, Gil Gordon, Reeves Little, Kristin Bromm are all working in Hotmail now. We spent 1999, 2000 and most of 2001 working on Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Entourage. Up in Redmond there are also a lot of new faces in MSN; a lot of folks who used to work in MacBU. Some of my favorite things about shipping web software is that you can move your entire user base forward, there are no legacy bits sitting around. When you fix a bug everyone gets that bug fix immediately. Furthermore, you get to use the .NET Framework w/o having to install any software on the end user's machine.

Oh, we have 18 job openings at Hotmail, positions in Program Management, Product Management, Quality Assurance, Development and Operations. All in the Bay Area. If you like shipping software, submit your resume :-).

SourceForge and Hotmail delivery problems resolved

omars — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 13:51:00 GMT

I have to say, I've been incredibly impressed with the level of support and professionalism at SourceForge (where dasBlog is hosted). For the past few weeks I've been unable to send mail to any of our hosted mailing lists from my Hotmail account. I filed a support ticket and after some back and forth, Ari Gordon-Schlosberg, just sent me mail letting me know they implemented a work around on their end to fix the problem (and provided me with a great analysis of why this happened). This was really excellent and professional on their part.

SourceForge is really great.

So... Um... Hotmail

omars — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 13:49:00 GMT

Wow, I didn't realize how I've learned to start almost every sentence with "So..." and boy do I say "Um..." a lot. Well, if you want to see for yourself, I'm on Channel9 talking about Hotmail. Scoble was down back in November and he ended up interviewing me.

Next time we'll have to get more folks in there. Especially some of the folks on the Backend team (the guys that handle the 2 billion inbound messages, as well as the gobs of storage). Just to be clear, I am not The Lead Program Manager for Hotmail. I am A Lead Program Manager. We have 4 of us, and we all do various things. My team happens to own the "Hotmail Front Door Architecture". That means the code that spits out HTML, DAV, POP, SMTP, and a few dozen other kinds of servers. Aditya is also a PM on my team, and he is driving a lot of the new stuff we are building. There is also a User Experience Team that Reeves runs, a Business team and a team that managed the live site (not operationally) that Gil runs. For a while I was doing both the Architecture stuff and the Livesite stuff and it was kicking my butt. Hotmail is a complex system and there are lots of moving parts and lots of new code shipping to the site (most you won't notice). Each and every day we try and improve site efficiency and performance. The key is making those changes to a system with lots of moving parts w/o impacting any of the parts from being able to accept and deliver mail while processing user requests.

The other day an anonymous person sent me this email:

"You are a manager on Hotmail and you say nearly nothing about it. You talk of other things always. Well, it is interesting what you talk about but I would have liked much more about Hotmail as well. Currently Hotmail is not well regarded due largely to the advent of Gmail. Google have the touch of an innovator and atracts public opinion. Why don't you fix this? Make Hotmail better again please. Aren't you going to make some announcements for Hotmail. A better interface perhaps? An interface which is faster and allows better e-mail searches?
We want more info from you on Hotmail. If we don't get info from you who is a Hotmail manager, from whom are we going to hear about Hotmail. How are we going to love Hotmail again? Do you care ore about you programming projects? Or is MS happy that Hotmail is still popular and does not wish to improve or even talk about it?"

Since I obviously can't comment on what we are doing right now, all I can say is "Stay Tuned"... :-). I haven't been talking about Hotmail a whole lot for obvious reasons.

Outlook Live

omars — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 06:31:00 GMT

What happens when you take the most utilized business communication tool and team it up with Hotmail as the mail backend and sell that as a subscription? Outlook Live.

This is a pretty cool service! You can use Outlook and have all your mail, contacts, tasks, notes stored on Hotmail. Your data roams and you can access it anywhere. I've been using this for the past few months and love it. It makes Hotmail as my primary non work account really slick. Furtheremore, if you don't own a copy of Outlook 2003, it comes with the subscription.

Hotmail, now with less ads

omars — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 13:06:00 GMT

If you have a paying relationship with MSN (you are an MSN subscriber or Hotmail Extra Storage user) you no longer see any banner ads when using Hotmail.

Just one of many enhancements coming to a hotmail near you ;-).

This also marks my first release as part of the Hotmail Team. Shipping a version of Hotmail is nothing like shipping client bits, and I enjoyed contributing to this release. More details soon.

PS - some one else noticed some other changes.

Hotmail Tips

omars — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 13:24:00 GMT

Reeves has some great Hotmail tips. One of them is very important. I just started forwarding all my e-mail to hotmail from another mail account. Many of these messages were being junked. This is because hotmail sees that the message is not address to “me”, being my hotmail address. The solution is to add your forwarding address as a mailing list.

If you want to understand what options you have when it comes to junk mail, safe lists etc, check out the post.

Oh, and in other news, starting yesterday Hotmail now Scans and Cleans infected messages. We are the only company (I know of) that does this for free.

80 hour weeks...

omars — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 11:39:00 GMT

For the past 5 weeks (other than a trip to Alaska planned a year ago) I have been living work, breathing work, and dreaming about work (not by design). And today the news is out.

Hotmail is aggresively moving to make storage a non issue any more (in light of gmail and yahoo's recent offerings). It's been incredibly fun, challenging and scary all at the same time. I'm really glad to be part of such a kick ass team... hotmail is going to be cool again!

Exective Summary of changes

Free users get 250 MB
Premium users ($19.99 a yr) get 2 GB of mail

In other news, Dick Craddock is joining my team as our Development Manager. This is so awesome. Dick worked on Internet Mail and News for the Mac, then Outlook Express, then became the Product Unit Manager for the Mac Internet Product Unit (which was merged into the Mac Business Unit) where we shipped OE 5 and IE 5 and rocked the house. He then left to work on MS TV and stuff, and is back in the e-mail game after taking a nice long sabbatical. Last week we had a little offsite in Redmond and it was funny how many former Mac folks were in the room...