Microsoft Kills Hotmail and gives birth to ‘social-friendly’ Outlook.com!

Microsoft the software giant killed its long standing email service Hotmail and gave its mail service over to ‘social-friendly’ Outlook.com.

The changes include the new email address “@outlook.com “ which will replace the older “@hotmail.com” address, used by  millions worldwide for more than 10 years of its service. Users can already "Upgrade to Outlook.com" to keep their existing address.

CoolMail

 Hotmail still the world's largest email service with 324 million users (about 36 per cent of the market) but had been losing its market to Google's fast-growing Gmail with 425 million users!

Hotmail was launched in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith and acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million. The rebranding and overhaul of Microsoft's email service is Microsoft's first major change in its email service in 10 years.

Microsoft is hoping that the new Outlook.com as a free mail service that pulls features from Hotmail and Exchange. It is designed for both  personal consumer use, Microsoft continues to position Outlook as its business e-mail client. 

We call it ‘social-friendly’ Outlook.com because;
Outlook.com is the first email service that is connected to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and Skype.It is integrated with Windows and Office, and can pull in Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and LinkedIn contacts. The new mail client has the Metro look and feel.

The integration of Skype into outlook.com will make a new rival to Gmail-embedded Google's Talk service. Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion last year.

Lets look at some other cool features of OutLook.com.

It connects to Facebook and Twitter to enrich conversations as users can view recent status by friends and Tweets shared by friends.

So as you check your emails, you can see your friends’ photos, tweets and status updates as well as being able to video call and chat from the inbox.

It will automatically detect mass messages such as newsletters, offers, daily deals and social updates and puts them in separate folders. Users can customize the process to sort mail any way they want to.

The major cool feature is that, Outlook.com comes integrated with Microsoft's cloud storage service SkyDrive, this removes the restrictions of attachment size limits.

Really CoolMail isn’t it!

If you are an existing user of hotmail, msn or live you can easily upgrade to the new OutLook.com and your email address, password, contacts, old email, and rules will remain unchanged. You can continue to send and receive email from their @hotmail.com or @msn.com or @live.com address.

Just over six hours after the new service was first announced yesterday,Outlook.com has seen more than 1 million people sign up for the service, tweeted Microsoft.

So why waiting,just give this new service a try and comment below or Twitter @Techstrip or  our  Facebook page.