It's amazing how many product failures Microsoft has not actually had lately. First we recall last week's name-server stuff-up, which the company insists had nothing whatever to do with their DNS software.

Nope, that was in fact a routing mis-configuration followed by a DoS attack.

Today Redmond announced that a major bung-up of their mail servers, which kept company e-mail in suspended animation for up to four days, was absolutely not the fault of their program, MS Exchange.

Nor was it connected to the DNS problems, which only coincidentally occurred at the same time, and which had absolutely nothing to do with the reliability of Win2K DNS server.

Nope; last week's e-mail logjam was a totally separate event, caused when a company test lab sent gargantuan volumes of mail through the MS mail servers. The test, unfortunately, "got a little bit out of control," Microsoft explains.

Now that we've got the facts, we're confident that our beloved readers will recognize the powerful forces of coincidence at play here, and refrain from drawing any silly, cynical inferences regarding Microsoft's cutting-edge, next-generation network expertise. ®