So, Whatever Happened to Hotmail, the First Webmail We All Used?

Last Updated on 2022-03-31 , 4:26 pm

It doesn’t matter how old you are: your first email would most probably be a Hotmail.

After all, who can forget days when we forwarded lots of chain emails just to make sure that our crush still remember us?

But most of you would have moved on from Hotmail to Gmail.

So, what has happened to Hotmail?

It’s still alive

Yeah. Here, take a look.

The simple answer is that Hotmail is being rebranded into Outlook.com , and its primary objective is to combat Gmail back in 2011.

Suffice to say, it didn’t win: Gmail is still the top, according to a Mailchimp study in 2015.

Back then, Microsoft admitted to “becoming lost with Hotmail”: “We really kind of lost our way a little bit. Gmail came out, they were doing some great stuff especially around storage and they were really being very disruptive and got an awful lot of traction off the back of that. We lost our focus on the end user. We’ve recognized that and realized that we have to make a lot of changes.”

Yeah, remember back in those days, we had to delete our emails just to make space for more emails?

Gmail was only live for everyone in 2009, but they spent almost five years in beta testing since 2004, in which only invited people could use it.

Back then, with that exclusivity, it kind of became a coveted email address to some extent, though I’m pretty sure that was not what they had in mind.

It was the storage space, and its easy-to-use interface, that edged over Hotmail: by 2012, the email had a storage of 10 GB.

Remember, back then, GB isn’t something that we’re used to hearing.

By July 2017, there are well over 1.2 billion Gmail active users.

Yeah, despite Microsoft’s efforts, they lost the fight.

So you’re a loser who uses Gmail and you’ve a friend who uses Hotmail or Outlook, you can proudly say that at least your email provider wins his’s / hers #selfconsolation