Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Outlook.com: Microsoft's New Attempt At Email

This move kind of surprised me. But it sure is a great move. It is a great attempt to bring the sexy back to the Microsoft brand name.

This quote below is from my first email in my Outlook.com inbox.
An experience with no compromises

Outlook.com is the first step in creating one complete experience for the next generation of communications. Email should be connected to your friends – whether they like to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, or a combination. Email should let you get more done, faster – with immediate access to your inbox and tools that can automatically categorize, move, or delete messages you don't want. Email should be deeply integrated with other services – for Outlook.com, you'll find that Office Web Apps, SkyDrive, and, soon, Skype come built right in. And we hope you have already noticed our fast, beautiful user experience.


Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes
Webmail was first introduced with HoTMaiL in 1996. Back then, it was novel to have a personal email address you could keep for life - one that was totally independent from your business or internet service provider. Eight years later, Google introduced Gmail, which included 1 GB of storage and inbox search. And while Gmail and other webmail services like Hotmail have added some features since then, not much has fundamentally changed in webmail over the last 8 years ..... email represents 20% of the time we spend on smartphones, and is used extensively on tablets as well as PCs ..... the first email service that is connected to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and soon, Skype, to bring relevant context and communications to your email. .... 50% of the email in a typical inbox is newsletters and another 20% is social network updates.


It does look clean. But then I only have one email in the inbox, one from Microsoft itself. I am more likely to come for Skype and SkyDrive, also the Office apps. For now I think I will stick to my Gmail.

This puts Marissa Mayer under additional pressure. Yahoo also needs to reimagine its email.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Larry Page