Like Bucky, I, too, feel that this sentence is so chronically broken that it simply MUST be repaired.

Let's have a go:

"Hotmail was one of the first random acquisitions (with no discernable revenue stream) which Microsoft gobbled up, in the early days of the dot-com boom. Microsoft has continued to fail to capitalise upon it, ever since - probably because there was no genuine business to be had, from such a system. Even now, people only create new hotmail accounts in order to avoid getting spam at their real email addresses. The earlly days of Hotmail, within Microsoft, were a comical litany of failures, prolonged outages and lack of service, while engineers struggled to fulfill Gates' dream of seeing the entire application ported off Solaris (which Bhatia and Smith, being good dot-com boys, had chosen) onto the fledgeling Windows NT. Many, within Windows group, who had been gifted with this thankless task, asked, among themselves, whether $400 million could not have been better spent developing something, in house, rather than watching DOS-Uinx emulators issuing 'parachute deployed' messages, all day long. At one stage, Gates, in his rage, at how slowly the work was progressing, picked up an Enterprise 400 server and threw it out of a window, trailing Cat 5 cables behind it, so that it smashed on the pavement below. Unbeknowns to him, of course, this was part of the live Hotmail service, and it's destruction caused Hotmail to become unavailable, in the Cisco bay area, until a replacement Sun unit could be sourced, installed with the necessary software, and plugged back in to the network. Today, Hotmail continues to shuffle around, stinking, and murmmering about 'brains', while senior Microsoft executives insist that the thing is 'Live'. Bhatia, meanwhile, was last seen touting free, web-based teleconferencing and planing his own personal city (quite where, no one is sure - possibly inside a hollowed out volcano). Smith, meanwhile runs a company which appears to patent things, but which does not have a website (perhaps he doesn't want to get spammed). Quite where the $400 million is, no one knows. Maybe Sir Fred has it?"