Omar Shahine has a blog post entitled From two to one where he writes
Well, one of my philosophies, and something I think our team shares is Don’t
piss off the customer.
How do you piss off the customer?
- Give them a 2 MB inbox
- Don’t save their sent mail, or make it difficult to do so, and then delete
their sent mail after 30 days.
- Make their inbox about advertising instead of about their email
- Have crappy Quality of Service.
Sound familiar? It sure does to me. All of these things are anti-customer.
What’s the point of offering a service that’s anti-customer? I sure as heck have
no intention of working on a service like that. I never would have taken the job
that I did if I didn’t know and feel that everyone around me was driven and
motivated to fix all of these things, and we have been working on all of these
since day I started this job.
Starting next month we are reducing the number of advertising from two
graphical ads to a single ad in the inbox. The skyscraper will be gone from
Windows Live Mail! I hope people see this as an olive branch from us to the
user, and the advertiser. The users will be happier and more engaged, and the
advertisers will ultimately benefit in the end. This change and its impact is an
investment that we believe is a smart one to make. Everyone in MSN has been
supportive of this decision and we wouldn’t be making it if we didn’t feel that
it was the right thing to do and better for all of us in the long term.
One of the best things about working on Windows Live is that on almost every team I've worked with there are people like Omar who totally get it. The number one priority for people building consumer services is making users happy. Now if only Omar and crew can get me some of the features from the Yahoo! Mail beta such as full support for Firefox and tabbed browsing within the in-browser mail client I may just retire my @yahoo.com email address.