Hotmail's New Address | Off the back burner | Some like it Hotmail
Off the back burner
Microsoft was early to spot the potential of free e-mail. Back in late 1997, it opted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Hotmail. But after that, the service remained essentially the same for a decade. Microsoft invested in more servers and additional data centers as the service grew, but Hotmail itself only saw modest, incremental changes.
Although the unit's product changed little, the company did manage to retain some key talent over the years.
Among these people was Reeves Little, who enjoyed the MacGyver-like charge that came from seeing what could be added to the nearly decade-old code. But prior designs required the software equivalent of bubble gum to stick on new features, Little said.
But when it came time for the redesign, code-named Kahuna, Microsoft knew it needed some new in-house blood to augment the Hotmail veterans. (Fewer than a dozen people remain from the original Hotmail team.)
One of the recruits was Mike Schackwitz, who had been working at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus on Internet projects destined to become part of Windows Live. The group program manager said the job, based in Silicon Valley, had twin allures.
One was that Hotmail was the company's single-biggest Web asset. The other was the weather. "Frankly, it rains a lot in Seattle," he said.
A week after he accepted the job, Google launched Gmail. "There was a moment of, 'Oh, yes, this does really matter," Schackwitz said.
While Schackwitz may have been motivated by the California sun, others noticed his move and decided something interesting might be going on at Hotmail. Omar Shahine moved there from the Mac business unit and brought a half-dozen good people with him. Suddenly, stodgy old Hotmail was, well, hot.
By last July, the company had a revamped version ready for the outside world to get its first look. Gone were the check boxes beside each message. In their place, Windows Live Mail offered a layout not unlike that of Outlook, Microsoft's desktop e-mail that lets people preview messages before they are opened and move items by dragging and dropping them into folders.
Hard-core techies loved the new look, with its Outlook-like reading pane and advanced features, such as spell-check. But when the company expanded testing in January to include more of its run-of-the-mill Hotmail users, they hit a snag.
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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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ENNUR KULDEMIR
02/10/2008 11:02 AM
OO HAPPLY
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