It's Official: Hotmail Is Brilliant Again

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It's Official: Hotmail Is Brilliant Again

Free Email Choice Just Got Better by SoftwareGuru I don't know what they're putting in the water over at Microsoft HQ these days but something has awoken the giant from its past few years of slumber. Innovation has been sorely lacking in Microsoft's oldest products and services until now. This customer-feedback integrated approach played a large role in the success of Windows 7. It continued with Office 2010 and now even before IE9 debuts we have a comeback of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction proportions: Hotmail is back! OK, Hotmail never went away but there's a very good reason why Gmail has become the popular choice for users in recent years: it was faster. Not only that but Gmail seemed better at keeping out spam and allowing you to connect with other Google services. Older, more established services such as Hotmail and MSN had grown stale and people moved on to the likes of Facebook Chat and Gmail. Big changes were required. The biggest failures in life will often lead to the biggest successes. If you want a movie analogy, without the mess of a film that was Batman & Robin it wouldn't have led to Chris Nolan becoming the director and subsequently giving us The Dark Knight. If Hotmail was a football match, it was 3-0 down at half time in a European Cup final and everyone thought they knew who the champions were going to be...
	Opportunities for Change Dust down and log in to your hotmail account today and you're likely to be stunned by the overhaul. Gmail loving tech site Lifehacker.com ran a review last week in which they admitted the new Hotmail is "actually pretty good" which is rare in a tech world filled with brand bias. Features reviewed include: "New one-click filters let you focus on senders in your Contact List, social updates (via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)" The ability to switch Conversation View on or off with your emails is a welcome option. Email attachments are handled in a much more user-friendly, visual way. Users can choose to integrate their free SkyDrive storage space with Hotmail to manage attachment files. There is a file size attachment limit of 50MB per file and 200 files per message. This is sufficient for emailing short multimedia clips but limited enough so as to prevent the distribution of tv programs or movies in digital format via email.
Office & Hotmail integration Another improvement is the embedded content functionality in the new Hotmail. Active View embeds web content in emails and there is much greater interactivity with the web's biggest sites from YouTube to Flickr. In fact, hotmail is now simply part of your Windows Live Experience so to tweak it go to: Profile > Services and from there choose which non-MS services you want to integrate with from Wordpress to Last.fm. Microsoft Office integration Document integration is fundamental to hotmail's revival when you consider the success of Gmail and Google Docs. The results are impressive. Lifehacker.com describes the improvements: "The new integration offers a lot more than just opening and editing Office documents; it also handles versioning, corrections, collaborative editing and seamless transferring of files between the web and desktop apps" Technology sites will have their own opinions but as always the future of online services will be decided by the users. Having a hotmail address can now open more free software experiences than simply Messenger or Xbox Live. If Facebook is our defacto family and friends social space, the future of our online working space has yet to be completely decided despite LinkedIn's recent worldwide growth. Essentially, the new hotmail stands proudly alongside the new Windows Live environment which we can shape and mould into whatever we want it to be. Lastly, don't forget what made us try Gmail in the first place: speed. The new hotmail is as fast as any of its rivals. Possibly even the fastest. Are we ready yet to change our perception of Hotmail? That's for you to decide. Click on the following link to visit our student software deals.

It's Official: Hotmail Is Brilliant Again

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