Comments on: What Would Make You Switch To Hotmail? [MakeUseOf Poll]

By: James

James — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 02:13:00 +0000

Hotmail’s spam filtering is atrocious.

By: Abc

Abc — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 12:27:00 +0000

Actually, it is not such a pain if you want to switch. just use trueswitch to move to hotmail from gmail and hotmail calender will import Gmail’s calender. But you will have to do manual uploading for docs to skydrive.

Also, spam filter is better than any other mail service (at least as far as I think)

By: MrBill

MrBill — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 01:37:00 +0000

I might switch to Hotmail if MicroSoft sold it to Redhat and Redhat fixed it. Anything that runs on a Microsoft machine sucks.

By: Galileo Vieira

Galileo Vieira — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:02:00 +0000

Hey, glad to be part of the conversation. If you ever want to get a tour of the new Hotmail, let me know. Great community btw, hadn’t been here before!

By: Yaara

Yaara — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:50:00 +0000

Hi Galileo,

Just wanted to thank you for taking part in the interesting discussion that has risen up here. I find it extremely interesting, especially since I was never a Hotmail user and don’t know the platform very well.

Good luck with all you’re doing!

By: Phil Fot

Phil Fot — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:19:00 +0000

Doing the job is the only thing you can do. Best of luck to you.

By: Galileo Vieira

Galileo Vieira — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:33:00 +0000

Phil, you are right that perceptions are hard to change, especially the negative ones. And there are people who had negative experiences with Hotmail in the past. It’s our job to try and win these hearts and minds back. Is it easy? Not at all. But we must try. We’re going back to the basics of email and getting the fundamentals right. And we’re also trying to add real value to our users by solving real problems. Will that by itself win back users like yourself? Probably not. But we hope that you’ll see the progress we’ve making over the last 18 months or so as a sign of our commitment to making an outstanding product. And, most important of all, we’re having this conversation, and I thank you for putting forth your honest opinion.

By: Phil Fot

Phil Fot — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:46:00 +0000

Hi Galileo,

Hotmail may work for younger people. Older net users still remember the pre-M$ days. And the misery when Hotmail moved to exchange/ISS. For many, that’s left an indelible black mark on Hotmail. For others, it the fact that it’s associated with MS, an entity that many people associate with insecure systems and viruses. Whether true or not, it will be hard to shake that off.

By: Yaara

Yaara — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:45:00 +0000

This is true. We can’t forget that Hotmail was there first, and many people just never bothered or never wanted to change what they were used to.

By: Galileo Vieira

Galileo Vieira — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:04:00 +0000

There’s another angle to this – Hotmail as an email web app and not as a service. You don’t need to use an @hotmail account to use the service. You can bring in your other accounts and even personal domains to use with Hotmail.

By: Galileo Vieira

Galileo Vieira — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:58:00 +0000

Believe it or not, Hotmail does work for some folks :) All joking aside, features aren’t the only thing that drives usage. Some people just like what they’re used to and don’t want to be forced to change habits. A recent example of this is the new Facebook layout. It caused a lot of people to be upset, but that’s also b/c they’re now into mass consumer adoption, not just tech enthusiasts like many of us here. At the same time, the product vendor must innovate and bring positive changes to the masses, without causing too many casualties. Not easy, really.

By: Galileo Vieira

Galileo Vieira — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:53:00 +0000

Hey all, Galileo from the Hotmail team here. Really loving this discussion. Many of the reasons cited for not liking Hotmail are pretty standard, and to be honest, we ourselves are to blame. Looking back, we stopped adding things of real value to our users and then Gmail came on the scene with a real strong value prop. We’re still paying the price for having fallen behind – many here are evidence of that. It’s for all these reasons, and many more, that we’ve been working hard on improving Hotmail over the last year or so. It’s defintely not the same product many of you perceive it to be. Do we still have catching up to do? In some areas, defintely. In others, we have some good tools that even avid Gmail users have told us they appreciate. I’ll be around so if anyone has questions, let me know!

By: Galileo Vieira

Galileo Vieira — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:46:00 +0000

How would you go about doing that for say, 500 messages at once, including messages not on the current page your seeing?

By: Arild Tiller Schjefstad

Arild Tiller Schjefstad — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:51:00 +0000

I have the same experience. Gmail is just better, my account is safe.

By: Phil Fot

Phil Fot — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:23:00 +0000

If they paid me USD$5 for every email that I receive and USD$10 for every email I sent, I’d consider switching from GMAIL.