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A Brief History Of Hotmail
Posted by GuestPoster in Computers & Technology
Created by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, Hotmail was released on July 4, 1996 as an independent e-mail service. A clever marketing move, the American Independence Day was picked to symbolize freedom from ISP-based e-mail. Not only that, but the very name carried with itself a specific meaning with an initial typing style “HoTMaiL”, the upper-case letter representing first letters of HyperText Markup Language or HTML. Already by December 1997, this service gathered over 8.5 million users.
After a reported 400 million dollars changed hands, Hotmail was added to the Microsoft family of products, namely the MSN group. By various group localization plans, this service gained fast popularity, massing a stunning 30 million users by 1999. Not everything was milk and honey in this story though, since in the beginning this e-mail service faced extremely high security problems. A famous high risk period was in August 2001, when for almost a whole month hackers ran rampart. This event, as well as the fact that Google stood up with its own service called “Gmail”, shook Microsoft into an upgrade for a high level of security.
November 1, 2005, saw the release of a beta version of Microsoft’s new e-mail service under the codename “Kahuna”. It was planned to erase the name of the original service into Windows Live Mail, but due to the preference of the beta testers’ developers named the service Windows Live Hotmail. The “new” version was released May 7, 2007 breaching 260 million users, which earlier that year received PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award. Since then a revolutionary upgrade named “Wave 4” was presented on May 28th 2010, offering 10 GB of photos, Active Views, Inbox Sweeps and more. Today over 380 million worldwide users stand by msn hotmail which is available in 35 languages. This figure is similar to the number of user using hi5 for social networking. If Hotmail really wants to increase it numbers, it should keep up with the latest email innovations such as online document editing, and others more.
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