Hotmail / Outlook.comCopied

Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1998 and used the brand for its free webmail for 14 years. On 31 July 2012 it previewed a replacement called Outlook.com, which it described as modern email for the next billion mailboxes, part of a wider rethink of its cloud services alongside Windows 8, Windows Phone, SkyDrive and the new Office.

The BBC reported Microsoft's case: email had become a chore because inboxes were overloaded. The new service would sort messages as they arrived, let users make internet calls via Skype, and bring friends' photos, status updates and tweets into the inbox, powered by a contact list connected to social networks. In what the BBC suggested might be a dig at Google, Microsoft said it would not scan email content or attachments to sell information to advertisers. The company said it had built a brand new service from the ground up.

Not everyone agreed. A Gartner analyst told the BBC that Outlook.com was reverse consumerisation, taking a ubiquitous business tool and recrafting it for consumers. He said there was no new technology, that filtering and social integration had been around for some time, and that what was new was the cleaned-up interface, the marketing spin and tighter links to Office web apps, SkyDrive and Skype.

Existing users could keep their @hotmail, @msn or @live.com addresses and add an @outlook.com one. The service launched as a preview with no release date.

The Verge's first look stressed how much the design carried the change. Built with the same Metro language as Windows 8 and described, like Office 2013, as modern, the preview offered a clean three column layout, threaded conversations by default, Skype video calling and a command bar that changed with each email. Hotmail users could rename their address to outlook.com or add an alias. Microsoft's line was that email could do a lot better than webmail. Renaming a service is cheap; a redesign this thorough is what made dropping a famous name feel earned rather than cosmetic.

Dropping Hotmail was brave and probably necessary; the name had become shorthand for spam and old accounts. Borrowing Outlook was the clever part, lending a free inbox the respectability of the office. The analyst was right that the novelty was mostly cosmetic, but in email, cosmetic is most of the battle.