You don’t hear phrases like that much. Generally, once a hot property becomes a lame has-been, you don’t base your marketing on it.
But you might think that’s what Microsoft is doing with its new free Web-based e-mail service,Outlook.com. “From the company that brought you Hotmail!”
Hotmail is still the world’s largest e-mail service, with 324 million members. But Gmail, only six years old, already has 278 million, and Microsoft was getting nervous.
And there were other good reasons for Microsoft to start fresh: because times have changed and e-mail has changed; because e-mail isn’t the only thing you do online anymore (see also Facebook, Twitter); and, frankly, because lots of people still think of Hotmail as, you know, Hotmail.
That is, Hotmail still suffers from its early image as a cesspool of spam, fake addresses and blinking ads. Even today, a Hotmail address still says “unsophisticated loser” in some circles.
Outlook.com won’t have that problem. It’s clean, white and attractive, even on a cellphone. (It matches the look of the Mail program in the coming Windows 8 and the Outlook program in the coming Office 13.) Somebody put thought into the placement and typography of every element — and tried to get as far away from the Times Square clutter of Hotmail as possible. (...)
Outlook.com represents a rethink of what the basic features should be in an e-mail program. It acknowledges, for example, that a huge proportion of e-mail these days is auto-generated: spam, newsletters, social networking updates.
So Outlook.com has buttons that, with one click, sweep all e-mail from a particular sender into the trash (a feature inherited from Hotmail). It also has a one-click Unsubscribe button that removes you from the mailing lists of legitimate companies, much as Google does. It can even auto-delete all but the most recent message from a company — perfect for daily deals like Groupon.
Outlook.com uses other smarts to categorize your messages. It has auto-detectors that look for messages from social media networks, messages containing photos, messages with package-tracking details, and so on.
Actually, those tracking messages are particularly awesome. Outlook.com inserts, at the top of such a message, the actual location of your package in big type, so you don’t have to trundle off to a Web site to look it up.
by David Pogue, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Stewart Goldenberg
