Windows 7: New Hotmail Update...

I haven't seen it either, but am also very excited. Even more so about the upcoming Windows Live Mail update.

I haven't seen it either, but am also very excited. Even more so about the upcoming Windows Live Mail update.

Wow, I wasnt aware of a Windows Live Mail update. I really hope they roll out some good new features and some customize options. I hate the limited color scheme they give you to choose from.

Two weeks ago, we started the Hotmail rollout with a single cluster. Right now, a few million customers have the new Hotmail – less than 1% of our customer base. We roll out new software slowly at first in order to give our engineers a chance to study the new software running at scale with real customers.

When we roll out new software, we typically find a few things that we want to tweak before going out more broadly. Most of these things are actually invisible to our customers – they usually have to do with our ability to monitor the site or make the rollout itself go more smoothly.

This time was no exception, and we have made a few minor changes to the way Hotmail works “under the hood” in order to make the rollout go even more smoothly for the remaining 99% of our customers.

This week, we will put the new Hotmail onto a few additional clusters that have slightly different characteristics (different hardware, different mix of customers), which will help us learn even more. We expect that we’ll make a few other tweaks as we learn.

After that, the release will really pick up speed, and we’ll start to put the new software on more and more clusters. Of course, we have hundreds of clusters and we want to make sure everything goes smoothly, so it will still take a few weeks to finish.