Hotmail, perhaps the first major success of Web 1.0, has evolved.
Microsoft has announced the launch of Windows Live Hotmail globally in 36 languages, complete with AJAX goodness.
The new service has been built to be a vast improvement over the previous Hotmail offering, incorporating input from more than 20 million beta testers. However todays offering is only the move from beta to roll out.
We’ve covered Windows Live Hotmail previously: back in February Michael Arrington took a look at the then beta service and the results weren’t positive, the new Hotmail ranking third behind Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.
Windows Live Hotmail launches with an initial 30 million users, with over 250 million additional users to be bought across in the coming months.
The new Hotmail is built on completely new code and marks the continued consolidation around the Windows Live brand.
In the coming weeks, Microsoft will be releasing a new free mail client meant to replace Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Windows Live desktop. The new client is called Windows Live Mail and will be a desktop client that provides Hotmail’s feature set locally on a users desktop. It will also support management of non Hotmail accounts.
There is some added benefits of logging into the new Hotmail; support is built in to allow Instant Messaging of contacts, or VOIP call contacts, with one click, which will also tie in with the Microsofts desktop IM platform.
Yes, Microsoft will drop all the existing development on Windows Live Hotmail and start again just because they released a new framework.
IMHO, Microsoft is still behind google’s gmail and many other ajax-based-web2.0-tools…
20 million beta testers? Wow… And they all provided feedback? That’s at least 20 million feedbacks! And I start to get dizzy when I get like 40-50 different feedbacks each on a different direction!
As for Silverlight, I guess the teams weren’t keeping each other updated on what they’re doing.
This update also seems to have put their JMRP folks in sleep mode. Usually they’d respond within hours but I’ve already been waiting over 2 weeks for a very simple question. Hopefully now that the service is out, they’ll get back to their usual response time.
I like the new hotmail and it was my first email address, as I’m sure it was for a lot of people, though I find myself using gmail more nowadays.
I never liked yahoo mail and just log in once every three months to make sure I retain my name.
Windows Live Hotmail has been in development since at least the start of 2005. That’s why they didn’t use Silverlight.
Live Hotmail should be a Gmail killer, but having just given it a go, it has one serious flaw. You’ve cropped the screenshot to take out the top 30% of the screen which is a giant space for a banner ad! Having the entire top third of the screen dedicated to advertising is a killer - since it adds significantly the need for scrolling. Not to mention the aesthetic impact. Cut that out, and they might be on to something.
The biggest flow for me that keeps me from using Live Hotmail is lack of 100% support of Firefox and Opera, which is obvious from a Microsoft product. In Firefox, you can’t resize the reading pane, very annoying. In Opera, they disable the feature all together. Force me to use IE7, that’s a no no. Allow me to use IE7 when I feel like it, I can go for that.
The other thing that they should have incorporated into the latest release is auto-completion of user’s email address when logging in. I’ve always hated this thing about Hotmail that you had to enter your full email address. At least JavaScript it to auto complete from a choice of “hotmail” and “msn” after the user inputs the “@” sign.
Sorry, but I’ll stick to my own hosted domain with RoundCube and Gmail as my secondary email. I’ll leave Hotmail to the challenged.
It doesnt support Opera at all, which is very annoying. But, if I ignore that and its actually very nice. Much better than the crappy new Yahoo Mail anyway. Gmail is still the king though.
I did a detailed review of it for my blog. Created this video for that purpose.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkL5uAgOBzc
I have no idea why they wouldn’t release their successful production webmail application without bundling a large download of version 1.0 *beta* code along with it.
The screen shot in this post shows quite a lot of spam in the inbox
I have been using this interface for over a year now. Its pretty crummy and really slow on non IE browsers.
Zoli, you are right typical Inboxes are full of Spam. Hotmail or Live Mail has the weakest spam protection I have ever seen.
The beta was basically unusable under Firefox, has it changed?
Also, as Zoli notes, the amount of spam let through by Hotmail is surprising (I mean the “Buy Viagra”, file-attachment type of spam. I though we were past that in 2007).
I agree that Microsoft should have built upon Silverlight.
They are a very smart group of people over at Microsoft, but sometimes they miss the obvious.
Why not Silverlight? Come on…
Silverlight = still in alpha
Hotmail = 100M users.
When the early “Join the Beta” banner appeared, I gave it a try. Didn’t like it much because it was slow, buggy and felt unstable.. drag and drop was a mess, and as the page loaded, clicking on a message would open anther one.. so finally I signed out and kept the good-old web 1.0 UI.
One thing I remember, is that it had support for auto-completing of email addresses.. but it was really awfully slow.. a bad implementation of gmail’s feature. Now I read it’s not there anymore.. guess they couldn’t figure out how to make it work as smooth as Gmail!
As for the question “why not use Silverlight”, at firs sight i wondered the same, but then I realized that Hotmail Live is in development since before “Expression” and “WPF”.. (or at least it was made public before).
I’ve demo’d the hotmail beta and the yahoo beta. They’re not for me. I’m a person who doesn’t mind that his webmail looks like a web page.
I recently tried gmail, and fell in love. Perfect mix of ajax and plain old HTML. Seems like they had the Saturn car approach, think about the people first, not the technology.
Enough with Silverlight already!!!
Something tells me “why not use Silverlight” is going to become TechCrunch’s new catch-phrase.
You guys are insane.
hotmail still sucks.
the gui is all cluttred and unusable, and works slowly.
it doesnt stand a change against Gmail.
really MS, is this your best shot? this is so lame and so 2002 , not 2007.
i am very dissapointed
When did TechCrunch become the official Silveright fan club?
“the wonderful foundation that is Silverlight. Instead of promoting a platform that has such wonderful potential, Microsoft has seemingly ignored it with Hotmail”
I think I just vomited a bit in the back of my mouth.
How is that TechCrunch can’t seem to find any negatives about Silverlight?? How much is Microsoft paying you?
This is MediaTemple all over again.
“My only question is why didn’t Microsoft build on the wonderful foundation that is Silverlight. Instead of promoting a platform that has such wonderful potential, Microsoft has seemingly ignored it with Hotmail.”
because silverlight requires a plugin that as of now, nobody has.
Please tell me it didn’t take MSFT 2 years to build a Webmail client. If it actually did take them this long, everyone should be shorting this stock. Seriously, teams like Zimbra and Oddpost have done this in far less time with far fewer resources.
The TechCrunch team AFAICT care less about the interoperability of the Web. So they will of course beat the drums for Apollo, Flash, and the next tool that comes down the pipe that requires a 100MB download and won’t work with 50%+ of computers in the field.
Are there really this many people so irony-deficient that they don’t see the sarcasm in the silverlight statement? I weep for humanity.
Of course there are valid reasons for MS not using silverlight. All of those same valid reasons apply equally well to all of the people MS wants to use silverlight, right? Microsoft isn’t eating their own dogfood, and it’s pretty foolish to start eating it before they do.
That was obviously Duncan Riley’s point. I’m astounded anyone thought otherwise.
I mentioned this over on The Compiler (where the tagline should be “C comes before T in your reader: Breaking stories after Techcrunch has already posted them”,) but I got a beta invite for live hotmail quite some time ago (least bragging rights about a beta invite ever?) and it’s been fully baked for half a year or so. That’s probably why it isn’t leveraging Silverlight, which is just now getting to the alpha stage.
I’m really not convinced that was sarcasm. (Perhaps Duncan can comment and clear up the confusion).
TechCrunch is not known for its comedy writing. Keep in mind that, practically no one got their April Fool’s joke.
They basically had to explain that it was funny.
Well, they are not using silverlight for one simple reason.
Because no system administrator is going to install it.
We don’t want or need another MS controlled standard.
They have lost the right to use their own formats and standards on the web.
I live in a house full with only linux boxes now. But a lot of the females have hotmail accounts. If they require silverlight, we will transition them to gmail or yahoo.
That is why no web master in their right mind is going to use silverlight. Webmasters hate Microsoft. We have to do twice as much work just because MS decided to not make IE standard compliance. They have lost our loyalty forever. (and we were a fan of IE, many many moons ago)
Maybe the reason that they didn’t build an entire product on Silverlight is that it’s currently in beta and subject to dramatic change.
Considering that both products were in development at the same time, it’s pretty unwise to try to build one on the other.
But any intelligent person already knows this. Now you do to.
It’s about time Hotmail gets some designer love.
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
>My only question is why didn’t Microsoft build on the wonderful foundation that is Silverlight.
Silverlight version wouldn’t be “light” at all. It would be heavy. It would use non-standard web widgets. It has poor accessibility. You couldn’t copy/paste. You couldn’t view it on a cell phone. Majority of people don’t have the plug. Plug itself doesn’t work very well (still beta). It loads slow. It’s local software so it could crash and it could also be hacked.
Mike, want me to go on about why this is such a bad idea?
I have been using the Beta since it came out. Gmail is better for several reasons:
Windows Live has a horrid spam filter. I get dozens of Nigerian-style letters, hottzzex/viagra emails and stock “tips” every day in my Inbox.
Windows Live is slow to load and opening emails is slow.
The banner space at the top is too big and the banners that appear there are the annoying blinking ones.
When I log in, I want to see my inbox not a graphic heavy Windows Today screen.
There are still bugs in Windows Live that I run into every day.
Links in emails do not open in a new browser window. Then when I click the Back button it takes forever to redraw the screen and get back to the originating email.
—-
I sent this list to Windows Live Hotmail months ago, but I’m guessing it got lost in the 20 million feedback surveys. It is sad to say that even Yahoo Mail is better than this. I’ll still stick with Gmail though.
Everyone is hung up on the Silverlight comment, I want to know why they didn’t build it in Flash…-Metagg
I am happy that I never used hotmail and never had “first love” reason to stick around with it. This version is still far from competing with gmail (and for that matter, my personal favorite AOL beta). Yes it can compete well with equally annoying, loaded with banners - Yahoo Mail Beta!
Too little, too late. And still no improvements to their customer service.
GJ
http://www.60in3.com
Wow.. after all this time, this is truly is pathetic:
* Seeing the “Loading…” message after EVERY action
* Slow
* Annoyances in non-IE browsers
* 2GB of storage.. yawwn, how original.
* HUGE obnoxious banner at the top
* Poor spam filtering
I agree with most of the comments that Silverlight would have been a poor pick to build this on. But, I also think this illustrates a point that I made recently about Microsoft and Adobe’s unwillingness to put some serious wood behind building on the RIA platforms they are touting. They both hypocritically disparage AJAX and other open technologies as inadequate, while continuing to capitalize on its capabilities and never buying into their own BS. The only losers are the poor fools who are misled into developing on those platforms.
Terms like “AJAX goodness” are awful geek speak. Makes me shiver.
What I want to know is why they stop doing MOOL (Microsoft Office Outlook Live). I have it and love how it syncs my hotmail calander with my outlook at home and on my laptop. But now you can’t sign up for MOOL anymore. Luckily I already have it so I can renew it. But all of my friends who would like the same thing can’t get the service. You would think they would be happy to take their money if I am using it and its working just fine. Perhaps their new answer to outlook express will address this service.
I just logged into my account. Looks very different from the screen shot above. It’s amazing, but big ugly banner adds are just as ugly with AJAX. The “email UI designed around advertising” model seems to be intact within the new design.
I’ve had a Windows Live/Hotmail beta account since it’s inception.It is quite simply the most horrible email account I’ve ever attempted to use.It is terminally slow,completely unusable in any browser other than IE7,infested with spam and it looks like ass. I kept trying to use it occasionally to see if it got any better,but it’s actually worse now than ever.GMail and the new Yahoo Mail (in spite of you Yahoo detractors) are the only useful webmail services,period.
I’m not quite sure why people keep spreading FUD about interoperability with non-IE browsers.
I don’t use IE, and WLH runs just fine in Firefox and Opera. If you say otherwise, you’ve probably got an extension messing with FF.
By streamlining the design and functionality they’ve arrived at a truisim of today’s web - simplicity unleashes value.
http://www.ebizmba.com
I want to know if this new Hotmail will let me move my stored email onto my local computer. I don’t want to be trapped with hundreds of emails stuck on Microsoft’s servers.
Ok so I’ll put my first comment being removed down to bad luck.
Why was the silverlight reference removed from the post when its clear to see in all the comments?
Anyone else notice this screenshot was taken on a Mac?
Mark Trefgarne is an idiot to think hotmail will be a gmail killer.
It looks nice, but do I get 2.8GB of space like Gmail???!
wow the screenshot is taken from a Mac
Allan, probably 2.8 MB..lol
I agree that Windows Live Hotmail sucks.
Still doesn’t work with Verizon-MSN partnered accounts:
“Sorry, but it looks like you won’t be able to participate in Windows Live Hotmail at this time.
This might be because:
Your account is with one of our partners and has additional features that Windows Live Hotmail doesn’t support yet
Windows Live Hotmail isn’t available in your area at this time
You have a parentally controlled account
Your Windows Live ID indicates you’re under 13″
And end the end who needs it ?