Cheap is Expensive

Disclaimer: NOT ALL CHEAP THINGS ARE BAD AND NOT ALL EXPENSIVE THINGS ARE GOOD.

Today, like any other day I visited my school email account hosted by Microsoft Hotmail .  I checked for any new emails that might be interesting or that needed any special attention.  Instead of getting an important letter from the school's president or from any of my professors, all I got was spam.  I had to wait for the ugly interface to load and had to read my emails on this vertical non sense orientation that I am not used to.  

I figured I could go to the settings section and avoid all the daily pain of going through spam by activating some sort of filters. None were found.  I also wanted to set up a forwarding system so that I could have all of my email sent to Gmail and avoid the entire Hotmail experience.  No you can't.  I went through all of the settings, (which weren't many) and to my surprise there wasn't such options available.  My next task on my to do list was to change the layout of the website since it is set up on a vertical way, and no theres no option for that.   So can I at least change the color of the layout? like in every other email provider? I don't like the golden with red accents, who does? No you cannot do that either.

But the pain of having to go through such horrible experience daily is manly the fault of some other people I have not yet met.  These IT people thought it would be convenient that after their previous email server crashed so often, and who knows maybe hacked too the school was due for a change.  Information was being compromised and the school could not longer handle to run their own servers.  In order to fix the problem they would have to hand out their problem to another email providers. And so BYUH went shopping... and they came across Microsoft's Hotmail and Google's Gmail. 

Their motto while looking for a new host I believe, judging by their decision was "the cheaper the better". I has almost been two years since that happen and at the time Hotmail was already dying.  The only people using Hotmail are moms, and IT people.  Due to that decision the entire community of BYUH has to stick to this stupid email FOR LIFE, or so they say.  "An email address you can keep for life to keep track on you, and notify you of future events" a person in the international office told me. 

Our email addresses went from being a simple @byuh.edu to an unnecessary namelastname@go.byuh.edu.  And all of this in the name of reliability.  What is the point of adopting an interface that has a calendar built in if I still get the student bulletin every day informing me of activities that should be in the calendar? Why not just put the events in the calendar like in the new LDS member website? (ldsaccount.lds.org) Is the school not owned by the church? Why don't we follow their example in choosing the right technology?

Cheap is expensive in the long run.  I hate to say it but the people behind this decision were not committed  to quality or service.  Maybe it is just because we don't want to be in the top 100 schools as Google says,

or maybe it is because we don't need these features:

but the truth is that I am stuck with this (notice that my inbox is filled with bulletins):

when it could be looking more like this:

Or even like the church's website:

Right?