yourname@dr-ait.org – Micro$oft, You suck more!

If you thought Micro$oft just sucked, then you are wrong. It sucks more and to the core.

Recently, Micro$oft adopted one of the cheapest tactics to drive hotmail users away GNU/Linux.

Hotmail users can only read their mails from a Linux Browser. They cannot compose mails nor reply to emails recieved when working on a Linux System.

Do you believe this? The best part of the whole story is, how many GNU/Linux users even care to use Hotmail?

OK, I just used firefox in Window$ to login to the hotmail account. I had two weird experiences.

Just as I logged in through my favorite browser Firefox, (Firefox 3.0.4, the lastest version till date) I was greeted by a message instructing me to upgrade my browser. I don’t understand how much more advanced a browser has to be, to display a simple hotmail inbox. God save Micro$oft.

Upgrade your browser?

Bingo! I had a new mail saying Bill Gates would come to Bangalore. The mail was sent by the M$ student partner to all my classmates, 50 of them. I thought of replying to all with a Thank you message and clicked on the Reply to all button.

Guess what happened! I got an error message:

Please remove some of your recipients. You can send your message to 10 people at a time.

How rude!

A M$ student partner can send en email to 50 recepients at a time while I can reply to only 10 people at a time? What kind of a f#$king logic is this? Why are not all people treated equally?

I request sincerely from the bottom of my heart, Please do not use Hotmail.

yourname@dr-ait.org – Micro$oft, you suck!

How many times again and again and again does Micro$oft proves its non-competency in the industry? This really has reached heights of monopoly and an unsatisfiable quench to conquer the world. In the process Micro$oft fails miserably and makes a fool of itself.

I take a “live” example to prove myself.

Having a mail server is a primary necessity for any educational institution. Since my college did not have one, the concerned personnel in collaboration with the Micro$oft Student Partner decided to use Micro$oft applications to provide email IDs to students and staff. This is surely a matter of pride for anybody in the institution to have the email – yourname@dr-ait.org.I appreciate the pain taken by these people to create email IDs for more than a thousand students and staff.

I don’t blame the college personnel for their ignorance to choose Micro$oft Live @edu. Micro$oft’s cheap mentality behind providing these services which they claim to be free(definitely not) is to be blamed.

All students were instructed to login into their mailbox at http://mail.live.com . I was stunned at what I saw. Anybody who wants to access his mailbox is forced to use Internet Explorer. The server will not respond if the user uses Mozilla Firefox. Holy shit, Isn’t this crap.

The error message I saw, left me speechless. Never before ever in my experience Mozilla Firefox had I seen this kind of an error message – “Redirect Loop”. Screenshot of the error is here.

You have to believe me at this point of time that I have enabled cookies.

The second note made me laugh my heart out -

Its likely to be a server configuration error and not on your computer.

Do not get fooled by the link in the address bar. Its redirected from http://mail.live.com. Its been a tradition of Micro$oft to make links look complicated just to show off.

Still don’t believe me? See this video. I am using Ubuntu Hardy Heron with Firefox 3.

Huh!

Finally, Opera could open the mailbox and what I saw made me say YUCK! If shit could shit, it would be Hotmail and its mailbox interface.Its so hard for anybody using GMail for more than four years where life is made easy, to just even compose a mail in Hotmail.

Micro$oft boasts that it provides these services for free? Ah-em. There are banner Ads and Flash based Ads in the mailbox. One in the header and another in the sidebar. I just sent a mail to my GMail ID to test the validity of Hotmail. Again, Micro$oft proved its Business mentality. Automatically Text Ads were added to the signature of the email sent through Hotmail. This is so very irritating.

My sincere advice to all institutions opting for a student-staff collaboration – Please Use Google Apps. Save students from the crucked, cunning world of Micro$oft.

I repeat, Micro$oft, you suck.