Microsoft today launched the all new email service "Outlook" (outlook.com). Microsoft has refurbished its old email service hotmail and gives an absolutely stunning interface. It has a very elegant, simple yet sophisticated interface. It gives a never assumed emailing experience. It has a different strategy to manage all your annoying newsletters which you subscribed out of curiosity.
Outlook also helps you to be "connected" (as VP of cloud services at MSFT calls it). You can see all the information from your social networking accounts and have that right on your email account and actually respond to your friend's comments or photos. Looks like MSFT is making its deal with Facebook count as much as possible. Not to forget "tagging your friends with Bing search" feature, which Microsoft introduced not very long ago.
Interview of Chris Jones, VP cloud services at Microsoft
Techcrunch indicated that Outlook comes with a 7 GB free cloud storage. Even before I logged in to check it out, I assumed MSFT is bringing in its already
existing feature of 7 GB free storage it gives with Skydrive and I
wasn't wrong. I had to look around for a while though, to learn how to access my Skydrive from outlook.com. However, it is neatly integrated with the email service. You can log-in to outlook.com using your existing Windows Live username or what Microsoft calls as Microsoft Passport. It need not necessarily be a @hotmail.com or a @outlook.com account which is a good thing as no one needs or wants to create a new email address for every email service. You can integrate any of your email accounts with outlook and use outlook.com forever (at least until yet another mind-blowing email service is made available).
Microsoft also promises to integrate skype with the new outlook, which means we will have a gmail video chat experience in outlook (without the delay though :)). The news comes out the day after gmail's announcement of integrating Google Hangout with gmail (which didn't really make me a happy man). Hope the skype integration doesn't come at an expense of access speed to emails. Though, I feel MSFT has taken a while to get here, I should say it has got here in style. Have to wait and see what would be its strategy to pull Gmail users towards outlook.
The only thing that keeps me worried about this new Outlook is the irrelevant Bing ads in the side bar. I got an immediately reply from an Outlook representative for one of my techcrunch comments saying "One of the core pillars of Outlook.com is that we don't read your email in order to show you ads. The Bing deals and offers on the right hand side of your inbox are based on the info you provide us; your gender, age, location etc. We're working hard to improve the relevancy of the Bing deals and offers you see, and these will improve over time, but we want to make sure that is not at the expense of your personal privacy. If you'd like to see more relevant Bing deals and offers make sure your account information is up to date with you age, gender, location etc." Though, I should respect the privacy policy of MSFT, I am wondering how could the quality of ads improve by just knowing a person's age, gender, location, etc. May be I am not paying much attention to the word "etc" here. :) Let's wait and watch the game.
Outlook also helps you to be "connected" (as VP of cloud services at MSFT calls it). You can see all the information from your social networking accounts and have that right on your email account and actually respond to your friend's comments or photos. Looks like MSFT is making its deal with Facebook count as much as possible. Not to forget "tagging your friends with Bing search" feature, which Microsoft introduced not very long ago.
Interview of Chris Jones, VP cloud services at Microsoft
Microsoft also promises to integrate skype with the new outlook, which means we will have a gmail video chat experience in outlook (without the delay though :)). The news comes out the day after gmail's announcement of integrating Google Hangout with gmail (which didn't really make me a happy man). Hope the skype integration doesn't come at an expense of access speed to emails. Though, I feel MSFT has taken a while to get here, I should say it has got here in style. Have to wait and see what would be its strategy to pull Gmail users towards outlook.
The only thing that keeps me worried about this new Outlook is the irrelevant Bing ads in the side bar. I got an immediately reply from an Outlook representative for one of my techcrunch comments saying "One of the core pillars of Outlook.com is that we don't read your email in order to show you ads. The Bing deals and offers on the right hand side of your inbox are based on the info you provide us; your gender, age, location etc. We're working hard to improve the relevancy of the Bing deals and offers you see, and these will improve over time, but we want to make sure that is not at the expense of your personal privacy. If you'd like to see more relevant Bing deals and offers make sure your account information is up to date with you age, gender, location etc." Though, I should respect the privacy policy of MSFT, I am wondering how could the quality of ads improve by just knowing a person's age, gender, location, etc. May be I am not paying much attention to the word "etc" here. :) Let's wait and watch the game.
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