Microsoft’s official Office blog says the company has been “humbled by the fast pace of adoption” of the Outlook.com email service. (I’m trying to picture that scene in my mind right now and it’s difficult.) The blog reports that Outlook.com has gained over 60 million active users within the last six months. The service has undergone “many improvements” in the last half year and has now come out of its preview stage.
Outlook.com will now roll out globally and having hit the “general availability” stage Microsoft Hotmail users will start to get migrated over to the new service. There are currently 300 million Hotmail users, by the end of the summer Microsoft intends that they should all move over to Outlook.com. Hotmail users can switch over by themselves at any time or starting this week they may be included in one of the waves of upgrades pushed from Microsoft’s side.
Microsoft now intends to heavily promote Outlook.com with a “large-scale marketing effort around the world”. According to the Office blog the highlights of the new Oulook.com email service are as follows:
- Delivering a beautiful, fresh and intuitive experience on modern browsers and devices
- Keeping people connected to their friends and co-workers across the networks they really use
- Providing a smart and powerful inbox to handle today's email needs, including SkyDrive for sharing virtually anything in a single email
- Putting people in control by prioritizing their privacy
The last bullet point there may well be a little swipe at Google's privacy policy.
Microsoft wants to promote a feature of Outlook.com called sweep (featured in the video above), which helps keep your main mailbox view clear of emails that don’t need your attention straight away with automatic moving, archiving, or deleting of certain emails.
Yesterday we covered another enforced migration from Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger to Skype.
