“Microsoft Corp.’s sweeping new Internet initiative, dubbed
HailStorm, is raising security and privacy questions, including how
well Microsoft can manage a huge database of personal information
that could include people’s calendars, address books and
credit-card information….”
“Microsoft officials acknowledge that running large Internet
services isn’t their traditional strength.”
“‘But we’re committed to learning from the mistakes that we’ve
made, such as the outage we had in January, to make sure that we
put in place the infrastructure so that we can run these things
with extremely high degrees of availability,’ said Bob Muglia, a
group vice president, at a briefing this week. Microsoft has also
beefed up security in some of its products, such as Outlook, after
e-mail viruses and other problems cropped up.”