After an hour-long discussion at a status
meeting last month, the Hotmail redesign really boiled down to
one key decision: one big ad, or two?
Hotmail's New Address | Off the back burner | Some like it Hotmail
After months of reworking the venerable Web mail program, Microsoft's team had made all the easy fixes: They'd added more colours and even offered a way to make the new Windows Live Mail look just like the old Hotmail.
But sitting around a table in the nondescript Pyre conference room in Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices, the half-dozen developers and managers couldn't avoid the thorny issue that remained. A significant number of people believed that the new design had too much space devoted to ads, making it hard to use some of the mail program's new features.
The ad placement decision may seem minor. But it's a key one for Microsoft, which is trying to turn Hotmail's hundreds of millions of casual e-mail users into customers for a wide variety of Windows Live personal services.
Offer too many ads and the company risks alienating users and sending them flocking to rival online services. But if it forsakes the second ad, it risks choking the revenue the business needs to compete with the likes of Yahoo and Google.
"Removing one of those ad products is a very costly thing," product planner Richard Sim told his colleagues during a meeting about the ad issue, among others. But in the end, everyone knew what had to be done. Painful as it was, they had to side with their users and hope the dollars would be there.
It's a big bet for Microsoft, which has spent the past two years overhauling Hotmail into what is now dubbed Windows Live Mail. After years of leaving the e-mail service largely on autopilot, Microsoft was jolted into action on April Fools' Day 2004, when Google launched Gmail, a Web-based e-mail service with a gigabyte of free storage. Since then, Microsoft has been racing to catch up.
Sara Radicati, who heads the analyst firm Radicati Group, said an overhaul is definitely needed.
"The Hotmail service has kind of lagged behind some of the others," Radicati said. By being early to the market with a free service, Hotmail for years found it easy to sign up more and more users. "Probably, they became a little bit complacent."
Even those inside the company generally agree that the launch of Gmail was a giant wake-up call.
"When Gmail came, it basically raised the bar on expectations and also capabilities of what is a modern Web browser application," said Richard Craddock, the development manager for Windows Live Mail, which is set for launch later this year.
Microsoft had been kicking around ideas on how to revamp Hotmail since at least 2002, but the ideas stayed on the drawing board until Gmail came around.
"It became very clear ... this is what we should be doing,'" Craddock said. "Somewhere along the way, we realised there was probably a lot more money in this free e-mail service than we recognised before."
noora
17/05/2007 05:29 AM
GREAT
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JR
15/09/2007 03:24 PM
Your photo set up hopeless -old one miles better!
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rebecca
11/10/2007 09:49 PM
ok very good and fun. i think is differnet with hotmail. i love it xxx
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