Yesterday, many users of the Hotmail e-mail service thought that they had lost their mail accounts for good. There is no direct link to Hotmail, so some took to the newsgroups. Let’s face facts here and accept that it had to be the fault of Vista, IE8, and Windows Live Mail. Everybody knows that Vista is crap and one only has to resurrect blog and newsgroup postings from the early days of the operating system to prove it.

Some excerpts from the Vista Mail newsgroup..

“I would like to know if there is a way of retrieving our old mail because I had a lot of important things saved in my hotmail account.  Please let me
know how I can retrieve my stuff...thank you”

“this sucks”

“After making the grave mistake of downloading internet Explorer 8 my inbox suddenly disappeared.”

“Why is my mail button on Messenger automatically opening Outlook/Windows Live mail? I don't use these and want to know how to get it off.  I want my button to go back to opening hotmail. GRRRRRRRRR stupid microsoft...It wasn't broken, u didn't need to fix it! Now you've just screwed it all up!”

“helloo...i cant get to my inbox in both of my accounts! r u serious..i have them for years...i dont want this... i dont understand it..!! and even worst
it seems like my old mail is gone!! ...i hope u understand that some people have important things on their inbox !!! please put it back as it was..”

“Where is it? Where are my old mails? You cant just come in and take them away without any notice or instructions on how to use your new interface properly. Over 7 years Ive been using hotmail and just like that you guys mess everything up with your "upgrade", come on. Id check the "Notice me of
replies" option, but, OH YEAH... i wont know anyway.”

“WHERE are my inbox and ALL my emails? I owned this account for over 9 years, Im not going to start a new one just because you have a new stuff going on.
Want it back now, this is an abuse on your side!! And awaiting for some explanations also. How can you decide to do something like this without
warning your users?”

OK. So it would have been nice if there had been a warning of a possible outage sent to all Hotmail users, but not everybody would have had time to see it, and if the warning had been sent out weeks ago, many would have forgotten all about it.

This is a small taste of what could happen if we all turned to cloud computing, and why ALL computer users should use the e-mail account facility supplied by their ISP’s. I don’t know about you, but when I get up in the morning, I do not intend to rely a server miles away from me. I store documents and e-mail on my computer and, while my computer could fail taking everything with it, there are just too many things which could go wrong between me and a cloud, some of it accidental and maybe some of it not.

Protagonists of cloud computing like to put across images of soft white fluffy clouds but, having lived in the UK and Canada, I know a little about how quickly clouds can change from beneficial to outright nasty.