If you use Outlook.com for email, the last few days may have been a frustrating time for you.

If you use Outlook.com for email, the last few days may have been a frustrating time for you. That’s because Outlook suffered a 16 hour outage, taking with it Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Outlook account access for an unspecified number of users.

Microsoft has been carrying out firmware upgrades across its datacenters in order to allow for the transition of users from Hotmail to Outlook accounts. Although the process has been done several times before, for some reason it failed at one of the datacenters earlier this week.

The knock on effect of that was the datacenter started heating up quickly, which kicked into action safeguards to protect the hardware. Those safeguards meant a lot of servers went offline and Microsoft was left to restore everything after the heat had dissipated.

Clearly that process took a long time and required both human intervention and infrastructure software be utilized. Hence we got 16 hours of downtime.

Full access had been restored to all accounts by 5:30am yesterday, but Microsoft is still looking into exactly why this happened when the upgrade had gone so smoothly many times before. It’s bad enough to lose access for an hour, but 16 is getting to be ridiculous. I’m also left wondering why Microsoft couldn’t route the traffic through another datacenter in the interim.

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If you look at the Smart TV landscape today

Microsoft’s Kinect platform didn’t just breath new life into the Xbox 360, it introduced a rapidly adopted way to interact with your television free of a controller. As we explore new ways that this same system can be used, a demonstration of how it could be implemented for use on Windows 8 offers a hint of what to expect from Kinect 2.0.

If you look at the Smart TV landscape today, you’ll see the effect Microsoft had with Kinect. Several companies are trying to implement an embedded voice and gesture solution into their living room experience right now. Samsung’s Smart TV line has an embedded camera that you can use to navigate, though it’s terribly crude when compared to Kinect. Google implemented voice search into their Google TV platform, which is great for the few people that still use it.

On a gaming platform, Kinect works well. In an environment like Windows 8, there’s a need for faster and more accurate methods of interaction than just holding your hand still in a specific place for a little while. It turns out that what Kinect really needed was to be able to pay closer attention to your hands.

Right now, your Kinect is about as aware of your hands as it is your kneecaps. when you open and close your fists, or wiggle your fingers around, the Kinect doesn’t pay attention to them at all. The three camera system deployed by the Kinect isn’t accurate enough to pick out your individual digits, so to your Xbox there’s just a densely packed mass at the end of your arm it can’t really do anything with.

The only thing the Kinect could detect with reasonable accuracy as you move around would be the difference between your hand when it was open versus when it was balled into a fist. By adding in this functionality, you gain something that feels much more like a click, which is needed for something like Windows 8.

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Since the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT

Since the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT, users haven’t had wide-open access to Adobe Flash content on the web. Microsoft had opted to restrict Flash playback to certain sites that it believed to offer an acceptable “Windows experience for touch.”

That’s changed today, with Microsoft announcing that Flash playback will now be switched on by default for Internet Explorer 10 on both Windows 8 and Windows RT. The change applies to both the immersive and desktop versions of IE10 On Windows 8. Additionally, the IE10 desktop browser on Windows 8 will play all Flash content by default.

Other versions of Internet Explorer 10 will follow a new list. While most content should just play, certain sites that are known to be incompatible will be blacklisted. Microsoft says it’s a small list, but doesn’t offer any specifics. If you happen to stumble across a site that streams video using Flash and it doesn’t work, you’ll know you found an IE10 blacklist entry.

One reason Microsoft cites for making the change now is that web developers have clearly been working hard to make sure their Flash-based apps are working well with Windows 8. Fewer than 4% of the thousands of domains that Microsoft tests for compatibility are still causing issues just six months after the Windows 8 retail launch.

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