Oh noes!!

Bureaucrat-in-chief Carol Folt writes:

We are pleased to announce the selection of Microsoft Online Services as Dartmouth’s primary service for email, calendar, and collaboration tools… The new Microsoft service will replace Dartmouth’s “BlitzMail” email system. Although once highly innovative and beloved by many, it is more than 20 years old and no longer meets our needs. We know that Google and its various applications have many supporters. Yet, after careful evaluation, we have decided that Microsoft offers the most secure and best integrated service on the market today. We are confident that it is a robust solution that will allow us to provide modern and protected service to our community.

“Careful evaluation”: a euphemism for three years of administrative indecision, overfunded “research committees”, and a big, big check from Microsoft to edge out student-preferred Gmail. And so at long last dies one of the most annoying, antiquated, and irrationally beloved parts of Dartmouth. Tour guides will no longer have to utter the moronic phrase “Yeah, blitz is so cool, it’s like a mix of email and IM! I never call my friends to plan lunch after 10As, I just blitz them!” with false (or even more disturbingly, not false) enthusiasm to incredulous campus visitors. Sororities, including my own, may collectively freak out as a result of Folt’s cautioning us that “Microsoft and Google calendar applications do not integrate with each other.”

I for one look forward to being able to view emails with HTML, however.