Hotmail - The comeback!!

Upgraded Hotmail (ad funded) provides:
1. 250MB of free storage
2. 10MB attachments
3. free virus scanning/cleaning (unique to MSN)
4. 500 blocked addresses (5X Yahoo)
5. Calendar and calendar sharing

Upgraded Hotmail Extra Storage/Hotmail Plus: This is a paid offer ($19.95/yr) that provides users with 2GB of storage and 20MB attachments. It also eliminates graphical ads, includes client access through Dav (OE, Outlook) and yearly account expiration. This offer essentially matches Yahoo on storage and trumps on attachment size.

You know this already? Right... so when are you going to be seeing this implemented?

It is planned to be a staggered launch..
1. All Hotmail users WW will receive free virus cleaning (and not just scanning) by early July (neither Google nor Yahoo offers this service)
2. Upgradation of Premium users of Hotmail and MSN will happen starting July and November respectively.
3. Users in US, UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Spain will get their accounts upgraded by November. Remaining people (i.e. us in India) will be upgraded in following 12 months. A few users in US, UK and Japan will also get upgraded in late July.

Why is better than Yahoo:
1. More storage (100 MB versus 250 MB)
2. Security (Yahoo only scans while Hotmail cleans as well)

Why is it better than Gmail:
1. No protection from viruses.. so anybody could send you a virus and you will nver know till it has destroyed everything on your machine
2. No calendar or contact mangement functionality
3. No integration with Instant messaging (you can't see if a person is online or offline while you are writing an email. also known as presence management)
4. No integration with Mobile devices. (you can receive hotmail on mobile if you subscribe with the mobile service provider

Where hotmail can get beaten?
1. Anti-establishment sentiment
2. Yahoo has a great reliability record and has always provided more storage than hotmail :)

Email storage becoming a commodity (everybody has more than one email account). The real differentiator is in the reliability and value that your email accounts provides you in your daily activities!! Can someone beat the passport functionality built in with Hotmail accounts?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Community Star Discussions and Future

Making Vista Search your PST Files

Technocratical Society