December 28th, 1999

[6:00 AM] Oops, Microsoft Slips Up On Paying The Bills by Staff Microsoft appears to have goofed a bit. According to Slashdot.org (and to give attribution where earned, pointed out to us in a C-NET article), the company seems to have let a domain expiration slip by. Microsoft uses the domain passport.com to handle customer id information for sites such as hotmail.com, so when their 2 year registration lapsed, Hotmail customers were SOL. A Slashdot.org reader named Michael Chaney took it upon himself to help Microsoft out by paying the registration fee of US$35 himself. According to the C-NET article: The lapse, which was first reported on the Internet news service Slashdot.org, was apparently caused when Microsoft's registration for the Passport.com domain name expired sometime Dec. 24, Chaney said. The Passport.com site verifies user identification and passwords for access to Hotmail and about 25 other services, according to Chaney. Chaney said he paid the bill Dec. 25 at about 2 p.m. EST and was given invoice #11395965 documenting the transaction. An electronic copy of the receipt can be viewed at his Web site at "www.doublewide.net." You can find the original Slashdot.org article as well as the C-NET article at their respective web sites. They both have details we did not quote. The Mac Observer Spin: The question is, how the heck could our friends in Redmond allow this to have happened? You'd think they could have one of their gagillions of engineers whip up an Excel spreadsheet to track those pesky domains. Of course, when you own as many as Microsoft... It will be interesting to see if Microsoft officially says anything about this. Our guess is that the answer to that is a resounding "Not!" The C-Net article says that Mr. Chaney has not been contacted by Microsoft about the incident. This too will be interesting to follow. One thing for certain, it is very possible that someone new has been added to the unemployment lines this week. Microsoft