Techies express lack of confidence in the ability of Gates to stop spam

ZDNet has an article up stating that the general feeling of those in the tech world is that Gates was blowing hot air when he stated he would stop spam in 2 years time.

The survey shows that very few people in the tech world have any confidence in either the ability or execution of Microsoft - a very telling survey - at least in terms of stopping spam.

Microsoft sits in a key position in that they have a huge share of the desktop market, so their Outlook client is an area where client-side filtering can be greatly improved. But they generally have left that up to third party solutions and have a truly useless filter that comes built into the system (it only looks for specific senders and/or keywords, which was "good enough" a few years ago, but useless now).
But client side filtering is not going to "stop spam" as Gates has so boldly claimed. The method that he is proposing is via his equally large market share of servers - specifically the Exchange mail server product. They currently offer a small solution in their Exchange 2003 product in that it can handle SBL lookups, but for any other solutions, they force you to use third party solutions. But through their large market share, he wants to implement one of the commonly proposed solutions in which in order to send out e-mail, you have to pay - not necessarily money but payment in time/cpu/etc - this delay/charge would then make it harder for spammers to easily operate.

This is in no way a novel concept and is also not necessarily even the best way to go (there are a number of issues that immediately come to mind with any proposed spam solution, this one is not immune to this), and then on top of that Microsoft never follows the global standards and instead uses its weight in the world to push its own bastardized version of standards.

On top of all of that, Microsoft has a very poor reputation in terms of execution of their ideas, as well as security right out of the box.

It is the combination of all of these things that make the techie world skeptical that anything Gates has said is anything more than marketing hot air. His statements were largely aimed at investors and non-technical positions at companies. Using the Mircosoft name recognition, Gates is pushing an idea, but is not getting much support from the looks of it.

All of that said, it will be nice once Microsoft does step up with something that is easy to implement since they do have such a large presence on the mailserver side of things. Even if it only helps to reduce spam (if not totally stop it as Gates claims), then that would be a great boon to productivity and network bandwidth.

Posted by Eric at May 3, 2004 10:43 AM | TrackBack