Ellie's World

 

My great aunt, Mary Ann (Berry) Powers, passed away in April. In addition to being a nice person, she also had a cool and unusual career. As a young woman, she studied mathematics and went on to work on the ENIAC. She had some good stories that she told about her work many years ago. She didn't know that computers were going to end up where they did, but was always neat to hear about what the industry used to be like.

 

It seems that many comments here are about Windows Live Hotmail. If you'd like to give feedback to the team, please leave those comments on the team's blog at http://mailcall.spaces.live.com.

The New York Times recently published an article about Google taking on Microsoft with a variety of different products.

 

I'm on page 5 of the article. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/technology/16goog.html

 

It says:

 

Ellie Powers-Boyle, 25, a graduate of M.I.T., works on Microsoft’s Web e-mail products. In the last three years, she says, there have been a dozen significant upgrades of the Web e-mail product, and she has worked on three or four new features each time. “We iterate quickly,” she says. “For someone of my generation, the whole idea of waiting years to see if you made the right product makes no sense.”

 

I joined the Windows Live Hotmail team in August 2004, and have been working on Windows Live Hotmail (a.k.a. Kahuna) ever since. Today we finally got out of beta! We'd done some earlier pilots in certain markets and things went relatively smoothly, so today we are taking the plunge! When users sign up for new Hotmail accounts, they'll get Windows Live Hotmail.

Updated 1/26/2007

 

This story has gone from bad to worse. They found her body in the trunk of her car, all the way out in Santa Rosa in the parking lot of the junior college. Police say some evidence points to suicide, but they are still investigating. May was in my class at MIT. She is one of the truly brilliant people in electrical engineering, and very hard-working and thoughtful. I really want to know what happened.

 

 

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May Zhou is a graduate student at Stanford. She has been missing since Saturday. She went to MIT with me. I hope they have some good news soon....