Microsoft's Outlook.com Email Product Takes On Google Gmail

 

Google's Gmail service is getting hot new competition from Microsoft's revamped email offering.
Microsoft's newly revamped Outlook.com free email service is now available to all users, some seven months after it was introduced in a limited preview mode to replace Hotmail, Microsoft's longtime email offering.

With the new and refreshed Outlook.com service and its updated and friendlier user features, Microsoft hopes to continue to lure users over from Gmail and other services. In the last six months alone, 60 million people have signed up to use new Outlook.com email accounts, according to a Feb. 18 post on the Outlook Blog by David Law, director of product management for Outlook.com.

"Last summer, we released a preview of Outlook.com, a new modern email service from Microsoft," wrote Law. "Since then, we've been humbled by the fast pace of adoption with over 60 million people already actively using Outlook.com. During the same period, we've received lots of feedback and made many improvements. Today, we're excited to announce the next step in this journey: Outlook.com is coming out of preview, and people everywhere can get started and give it a try at Outlook.com."

Microsoft will transition all Hotmail.com user accounts over to Outlook.com accounts by this summer, according to Law's post.

"We've been very excited by the adoption of the preview and how it's delivering on our promise of a new, reimagined email service," Law wrote. "Throughout the preview, we learned a tremendous amount from seeing how people used the service. Early adopters have told us what they liked, what they'd like to see next, and what we needed to do to make more people switch. And we've used that to add new features and fine-tune the services to scale."

Microsoft announced the coming changes in a blog post July 31, 2012, to share its vision for the new Hotmail replacement with a reimagined look, feel and feature set. Coming eight years after Google introduced its now-entrenched Gmail product, the new Outlook.com is designed for "the next billion mailboxes," according to Microsoft.

Among the key new features of Outlook.com are a fresher and intuitive experience on modern browsers and devices, tighter integration with social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and smarter and more powerful inboxes to handle the email needs of users, including SkyDrive for sharing virtually anything in a single email.

Outlook.com also includes new tools for handling newsletters and commercial mail, as well as a new feature called Sweep that helps users clear out their inbox by moving, archiving, or deleting specific email, according to Law's post. "Outlook.com was also designed to make it easy to send hundreds of photos, videos and just about everything people want in a single message—all powered by SkyDrive.