(CNN) -- When Microsoft introduced a preview version of a fresh and inventive webmail service it called Outlook.com
last August, it was pretty clear that it was telling the world that it
intended to start winding down its venerable Hotmail sooner or later.
Now it's official.
The company is announcing
that Outlook.com is coming out of preview mode and is now officially
available worldwide. And so it's going to start moving more than 300
million Hotmail users over. They'll be able to keep their Hotmail.com
e-mail addresses — or Live.com or MSN.com, if that's what they've got —
but the Hotmail service and brand will be going away.
The transition will be
gradual: At first, the Hotmail faithful will get e-mails and other
alerts telling them about the switchover. They'll be able to make the
jump immediately, or postpone it. But by the end of the summer, the
company intends to have moved all Hotmail users over to Outlook.com.
For most of those people,
that should be a good thing — or at least, as forced transitions go,
not a bad thing. While it's impossible to underestimate the ferocity
with which some folks prefer to clutch onto whatever they've already
got, Outlook.com is a far better service than Hotmail, with a radically
decluttered interface and useful new organization tools. (I also like
its interface — which is a variant of the Windows 8 look formerly known
as Metro — better than Gmail's.)
Yet it's also
recognizable as having a family connection to Hotmail, reducing the
chances that anyone will be bewildered by it or will lose a favorite
feature once the switchover is complete.
At the moment, Microsoft
says, Outlook.com has 60 million active members, a third of which are
Gmail users. (Presumably some of those are true defectors from Gmail,
while others use both Gmail and Outlook.com.) Once the Hotmail
transition is complete, Outlook.com will have hundreds of millions of
users, giving it the same sort of massive scale as Gmail (425 million
users as of June 2012) and Yahoo Mail (281 million users as of December
2012).
And Microsoft seems to be
serious about winning over lots more users from Gmail and other
services: It's planning to advertise Outlook.com heavily in all sorts of
media. The company has posted a couple of splashy TV spots — both of
which, unlike the current Scroogled campaign, are devoted to making people feel good about Outlook.com rather than bad about Gmail.
While I'm favorably
impressed by Outlook.com, I'm not considering dumping Gmail myself
anytime soon; Google's service remains a much richer platform, with
additional useful features, mobile apps and support from third-party
apps and services. Microsoft says to expect more Outlook.com features
now that the service is out of preview mode, including Skype video calls
and a calendar, both of which the company first promised when it
announced the service last year.
I'll be keeping an eye
on it — an Outlook.com which retained its sleek look and competed with
Gmail in depth and breadth of capabilities could be spectacular.
Even Gmail users who
have no intention of leaving the service should be happy that
Outlook.com exists. Just as Microsoft's Bing gives Google's search
engine its only serious competition, Outlook.com is poised to be Gmail's
most imposing rival.
I'm still getting used
to the notion of Microsoft, of all companies, being a plucky underdog —
but I'm glad it's giving Google at least two incentives to avoid resting
on its laurels.
Microsoft will start moving its 300 million Hotmail users over to Outlook, its new Web-based e-mail service.
