Microsoft's New Hotmail

Microsoft has announced that they will upgrade the current Hotmail email service. This move is made to make Microsoft more competitive in the email service market, in which Yahoo and Google are their main competitors.

Microsoft will introduce the new Hotmail in July or August. The new Hotmail will be able to classify users' main contacts, social networks and mails. Also, it will allow users to view pictures, videos and other contents in the mail without opening it. In addition, Microsoft adds new tools to Hotmail, facilitating the sending of pictures, videos, files and other attachments. The New Hotmail will also make possible the better usage of it on cell phones.

Hotmail's new tools will significantly minimize users' time in managing their mailboxes and allows users to have more time to read their email contents. Microsoft hopes that these new functions will bring much convenience to their users, making Hotmail more competitive against Google and Yahoo.

Even though Microsoft had not made many upgrades to their Hotmail service, Hotmail is currently still the world's most used email service, with over 360 million users. On the other hand, Yahoo has 284 million users and Gmail has 173 million users. However, in United States, Yahoo is the most popular email service, with 95 million users, while Hotmail and Gmail have 47 million and 43 million, respectively.

In summary, Hotmail's most important change will be in users' viewing of pictures and videos in their mails. This upgrade will most likely be very popular among users because Hotmail's 55% storage will be used to pictures. Microsoft's new technology will check to see if the mail contains picture attachment. If it does, the top of the mail will automatically show the pictures preview. Moreover, if it detects that the picture points to Flickr or SmugMug, or the video points to YouTube or Hulu, Hotmail will provide preview of these files.

New Hotmail's another major upgrade is to facilitate users' sending of pictures, videos and other contents. The upgraded Hotmail will provide a new toolbar. This toolbar will help users to send a maximum of 10GB attachments. Users will need to send the attachments to Microsoft's free online storage service, Skydrive. Only email recipients will be able to view these attachments on Skydrive.

Hotmail's security is also improved. Microsoft makes Hotmail to support SSL security, minimizing the risks of being hacked. All in all, this is one of the most important and significant upgrades Microsoft makes to Hotmail. We will see if this upgrade will be a successful one in future months.