After nearly two years in public beta, today marks the worldwide launch in 36 languages of the new Windows Live Hotmail. Windows Live Hotmail is the successor to MSN Hotmail and is the most significant update to our webmail service since it pioneered the industry in 1996. The service was built from the ground up incorporating millions of pieces of feedback from more than 20 million consumer testers. With our customer’s help we've developed a more powerful service that keeps our customers safer online, enables people to be more productive with a look and feel more like Outlook, and provides more ways for customers to use their e-mail seamlessly across the web, mobile devices and PCs.
This launch is important to our business on many fronts. Windows Live Hotmail is a cornerstone online service for Microsoft and a critical piece of our online advertising business which is why we’re launching it today on the eve of our 8th Annual Strategic Account Summit. But Windows Live Hotmail is more than an ad-funded consumer webmail service. It’s the e-mail backbone for telco partners like Bell Canada, as well as Microsoft services like Office Live and Windows Live @ edu, a program which is being adopted by more than 250 university and alumni associations worldwide. Windows Live @ edu was recently chosen to power "Penn Live" for the University of Pennsylvania, including the Wharton School. We beat out Google, and according to university officials it was due to our “unique institutional offering (and) desire to build a partnership for development of future technology services.”
Windows Live Hotmail also showcases how we’ll deliver more value as a company with software + services. Today we announced a big change – Windows Live Hotmail will allow customers to access their accounts for free via Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 with the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector (formerly a subscription-only feature). The webmail service plus our premiere client offering will enable a more powerful solution for customers with rich synchronization of e-mail, folders and contacts and offline access to Hotmail with Outlook. A beta of the connector will be available in 11 languages in the coming weeks and this is only the beginning. We intend to continue to deliver richer software + services solutions for customers as we make additional investments in free consumer e-mail client software moving forward.
Early press reaction to Windows Live Hotmail has been positive, and we expect this momentum to continue as we move out of beta and deploy worldwide.
If you've been with us on the Windows Live Hotmail journey -- thank you for your help building our next generation webmail service. This is really just the beginning as we now have a solid foundation to more nimbly advance and innovate. Starting today and ramping up over the coming months we’ll be reaching out to all of our 280 million customers to update them to this new, more powerful service. If you aren’t already using the service, get an account or update your existing account to find out why webmail is hot again at
www.discoverhotmail.com.