According to comScore:
“Hotmail, recently renamed Outlook.com, ranked as the top web-based email provider in Europe with 108.2 million visitors (up 1 percent vs. year ago) for an average of 1.9 hours per user during the month. Google’s Gmail ranked second in the Email category with 74.7 million users but saw a much stronger growth rate of 18 percent over the past year. “
This is a significant finding because most users of PCs run that other OS and have many opportunities to encounter M$’s services so these new users are actively seeking alternatives. Further, M$ apparently sees less value in the trademark “Hotmail”, and discards brand loyalty. I don’t see M$ being able to stem the flow with just a change of name. It remains to be seen whether their “cloud” activity will somehow revitalize their growth in e-mail. With “8″ in the pipe-line there’s nothing special on the horizon for e-mail for the users not now locked in.
At this rate, by 2015, Gmail should overtake Hotmail. Competition on price/performance is good. We should see all sectors of IT seeing similar sharp competition from now on because the desktop monopoly on which Wintel pivots is on its last legs. M$ has a policy of not engaging an enemy’s strong points. Apparently e-mail is one.
see comScore – Web-Based Email Usage in Europe Jumps 14 Percent Over Past Year.
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Started using Hotmail in the late 90s. I dropped Hotmail long ago for Gmail, after the spam became ridiculous and I suspect that this new domain will be more of the same.
Microsoft seems to have been particularly lax about withholding certain addresses from circulation. One PC Pro staffer managed to grab steveballmer@outlook.com, but that’s not the worst of it.
“I’m now the ‘proud’ owner of post.master@outlook.com,” writes Reg reader “graeme_from_it”. And he’s not alone. There’s also Ross Duggan, owner of no-reply@outlook.com; Ryan Hoffman, who nabbed donotreply@outlook.com; and who knows how many more.
Doubtless none of these three grabbed their addresses with ill intentions, but the fact that they were able to claim them suggests that Outlook.com may be a wide-open market for spammers, cybersquatters, phishers, and anyone else who wants to send deceptive emails.
One million accounts and counting, Outlook.com still has a long way to go before it can match Gmail’s reported 420 million accounts.
M$ has a policy of not engaging an enemy’s strong points.
Eh, do you mean like gaming consoles? Or server OSes? Or Office suits? Or databases? Or development tools? Gosh, these became way too many.
For the record, I never bothered with either gmail or hotmail throughout my life of being a private and professional Windows user, and a professional and occasionally private Linux user (still Arch as my favorite … bring on the hate, I’ll eat it for breakfast *chuckle*)
I don’t remember how I found it, and I have no clue how and what they are as a company, but I’m quite happy with inbox.com, and my ancient yahoo.co.uk account is surprisingly still useful.
But then, I’m a compulsive hipster … see my horn-rimmed glasses?
toodlepip (the .com variant of which is an actual free email provider … don’t ask) and cheerio.
Phenom wrote, “you mean like gaming consoles? Or server OSes? Or Office suits? Or databases?”
No. I mean like security and price/performance. You don’t see M$ trumpeting ads that their OS has less malware than GNU/Linux or costs less than $0.
Who cares? Did someone force you at gunpoint to use Hotmail? It’s just another FUD article from the “anything but Microsoft” hate machine. Only a brainless hater could diss Microsoft’s Hotmail/Outlook while at the same time he promotes Google Mail whose amassing and usage of personal data is on par with Facebook.
For the record, I pay for my email service. It works for me.
You don’t see M$ trumpeting ads that their OS has less malware than GNU/Linux or costs less than $0.
Of course you don’t see such ads from Linux vendors either. Come to think about it, you don’t see any ads from Linux vendors.
@PR
No. I mean like security and price/performance.
You mean assumed security and placebo performance per price?
Of course, without any proper quantifications, one can always claim just about anything with a bit of creative writing.
@dougman
Doubtless none of these three grabbed their addresses with ill intentions, but the fact that they were able to claim them suggests that Outlook.com may be a wide-open market for spammers, cybersquatters, phishers, and anyone else who wants to send deceptive emails.
Setting aside that “cybersquatting” an email account means jack squat and spamming/phishing would involve mass-mailing attempts easily distinguishable from normal email traffic, a much easier way to fake an email address would be to simply forge a header with false imformation. Didn’t your over a decade of “experience” tell you anything about that?
“I dropped Hotmail long ago for Gmail, after the spam became ridiculous and I suspect that this new domain will be more of the same.”
As I mentioned before, my secondary (“toy”) account is on Hotmail, and it’s surprizingly spam-free. Which most definitively couldn’t be said about the freemailer I tried before