Why you should own your online infrastructure!

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Do you put all your online efforts into one egg basket?

On occasion I work with business owners who put all their online efforts onto someone else’s infrastructure. They will always hear me argue that they need to stay in control of their assets!

There is no doubt that it is compelling to build out your presence on a rich platform, be it eBay, Amazon, Facebook, WordPress.com or any other platform. However you need to consider the risks…

Today’s example came from an unexpected direction;

Hotmail decided to change my interface into Turkish. The problem is that I don’t speak a word Turkish and I cannot use the online interface until it gets fixed.

Fortunately in my case, I mostly access Hotmail through Outlook so for now I am not crippled by this interesting development.

I have to say that the thing that aggravates me most is that I cannot figure out how to contact Microsoft to fix the problem. All I can find on their website is a link to the support forum. I may be supposed to ask someone who does speak Turkish to fix it for me but that is a long shot.

In fact, the same thing happened three or four years ago, but at the time I actually found a link (or was it an email address) that allowed me to contact Microsoft directly. This time I gave it a shot to use the support forum since that is obviously where Microsoft wants us to state our problems. If I don’t hear back in a day or so I will call their support. We’ll see if I have to pay to get this fixed…

The main question remains – why was the interface changed to Turkish. My only thought is that my name Håkan (a perfectly normal Swedish name) in fact is a Turkish name if spelled Hakan. But how on earth could that make the interface change?