Hotmail problems, IE market share down
If perception is important, which it is, January 4 was not a terrific day in the news for Microsoft.
A server outage with Windows Live Hotmail temporarily deleted emails for over 17,000 users. This problem actually began Thursday December 30, and wasn’t resolved until Sunday evening, January 2. I must have been one of the lucky ones, as I never noticed my hotmail mailbox afflicted. Given that Microsoft is touting Windows Live (and Hotmail as part of it) as part of their cloud-based offering, it wasn’t a good weekend for that particular cloud.
Then Internet Explorer, which has had market share slowly slipping away, posted its biggest 1-month lost in market share in the past two years – 1.4 percentage points. IE market share is now recorded at 57.1%, a far cry from the heyday when Microsoft was being sued for predatory policies as a monopoly because of the large market share of … Internet Explorer. The word is that IE typically loses more market share in December in other months, as people are browsing at home over the holidays (home computers are thought to have a higher percentage of non-Microsoft browsers than systems at work). Even so, the 1.4 percentage point loss was greater than it was last December. And browsers are of course used with clouds …
Internet Explorer 9 is anticipated to have a release candidate available shortly. Here’s hoping IE9 helps with that market share. As far as Hotmail … its just another example of why backups are not to be taken lightly. While a technical glitch caused email to disappear, having backups enabled Microsoft to get things back on track.
