Even after giving Hotmail a huge facelift, Microsoft preps a replacement for it.
Microsoft spent much of last year cleaning up and improving Hotmail, chasing off spammers and introducing new algorithms to keep your mailbox free of spam and graymail alike.
So I guess it stands to reason that the next logical step was to replace it.
But that doesn’t mean Microsoft threw the whole thing out. No, Outlook.com, the re-branded webmail service from Microsoft, will build on all of the improvements to Hotmail and add a few of its own. When Microsoft is ready to take it out of beta, Hotmail subscribers will have a new place to call home.
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Outlook, of course, is the business-oriented email client that comes with Microsoft Office. Windows XP had Outlook Express, a lightweight client that was actually pretty nice, simple and easy to maintain. Sadly, it was dumped with Windows Vista, which was bundled with the simply-titled Microsoft Mail. For Windows 7, Microsoft didn’t include any client. Eventually it released Live Mail as part of its Live product offering, which bore quite a resemblance to Outlook itself, while also lacking many of the features.
Hotmail, of course, has been around forever. It was one of the first webmail clients and used to be rendered “HoTMaiL.” You see what they did there?
While it was one of the first, it was also one of the worst. Hotmail became a haven for spammers. Some years ago, when I ran the DVD site for IGN, the spam and abuse from anonymous Hotmail users was so bad I finally blocked the whole domain. It was the only domain I blocked during my two years there.
Microsoft has tried valiantly to fix Hotmail, making significant strides to clean up the junk mail. But it’s clear the brand name is tarnished beyond repair and not making any headway against Gmail and Y! Mail.
Microsoft says that existing Hotmail.com or Live.com addresses will continue to work with the new Outlook interface, but eventually, Hotmail and Live email addresses will be migrated to Outlook.com. And since Outlook.com is a new service, that means all of the names are new. So now is your chance to get the email address of your choice.
Microsoft is clearly taking aim at Gmail with the new Outlook, as the announcement materials point out. Gmail is eight years old and so is its interface, which has only been slight tweaked since its release. It’s clumsy and pretty basic, and doesn’t work with any social media but the ghost town that is Google+.
Outlook.com, on the other hand, is connected to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and soon, Skype. It’s almost the basics of Facebook itself, with the ability to view pictures of your friends, send messages, get status updates, chat, and make calls.
Outlook.com automatically sorts your messages from contacts, newsletters, shipping updates, and social updates, and comes with free Office Web Apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, as well as SkyDrive.
I haven’t tried it yet, but on paper it looks like a very good consolidation of lessons learned from prior products while retiring two brands that were going nowhere.
