A quick show of hands here – how many of you actually still have a Hotmail account, and are you still maintaining it, or is it full of spam? Well, after months of testing out Outlook.com in beta, Microsoft has finally deemed it fit to open up their new Web mail service to the masses. Apart from that, the Hotmail brand name which has been in service for so long, will no longer be in use, where users will be “upgraded”, so to speak, to the new Outlook.com service. However, fret not, as Hotmail users will still be able to retain use of their Hotmail email address.
Dharmesh Mehta, senior director of product management for Outlook.com and SkyDrive, said, “It’s not a light brand decision. I don’t know of any other company that has hundreds of thousands of users and has changed the brand name. But this is something new, an opportunity to set us up for the future.”
What do you think entire Hotmail riding into the sunset? Should Microsoft have retained the Hotmail brand after all this while?