Richard Sim, Senior Product Manager for Windows Live Hotmail posts an interesting and comprehensive list of what the Hotmail team has accomplished since starting the project almost two and a half years ago. As he says, "(t)he UI and features that are visible to end users only scratch the surface of what we’ve done". Sim's list:
- rearchitected the entire service from scratch,
- swapped out the backend storage infrastructure (literally swapping out old boxes for new ones)
- instrumented user actions,
- created new ways to serve advertisements,
- developed new advertising products,
- created a scalable and flexible mail platform to power email for universities and other partners,
- managed a large scale beta process with a continuous user feedback loop,
- redesigned our product development and deployment processes,
- streamlined our signup flows,
- opened up Outlook client access for ALL free users (coming very soon),
- created a Windows Live Contacts (subscribe to contact updates) service,
- created a new selection paradigm for email client applications (dynamic checkboxes) which has been eventually adopted by Yahoo Mail Beta,
- and released a new safety bar to educate users about the context of every mail that arrives in his/her inbox
"Oh, and of course, rewrote the entire UI and released dozens of great features."