Microsoft's Outlook.com Hits One Million Users on Day One
Over a million users already, but will they stick around?
On Tuesday, Microsoft surprised us all with the unveiling of a brand new webmail service called Outlook.com. Sharing the same brand as the company's popular desktop email client, the service is Microsoft's attempt to revamp webmail. The company's Hotmail service has been flagging behind Google's Gmail for quite a while. Will Outlook.com be enough to take on the mighty Google? Maybe so.
Microsoft proudly announced on Tuesday night that one million people had signed up for Outlook.com accounts in less than a day of availability. The announcement was made via Twitter, so there's no further information on this number. For example, we'd like to know if it includes 'upgrades' from Hotmail or completely new sign ups. Similarly, we're sure there was a bit of a rush to secure popular or first-name-last-name email addresses.
Though one million is a massive milestone, Microsoft still has a long way to go before it reaches its goal. When Redmond announced Outlook.com earlier this week, the company described it as "modern email for the next billion mailboxes." It's going to be a while before that one million turns into one billion, but we're sure Microsoft will keep us posted. We'd be interesting in seeing how many people actually use the service. After all, it's one thing to get the curious to sign up, but quite another to get them to switch over from their existing provider.
Did you sign up for Outlook.com? Do you plan on using the account? Let us know in the comments below!
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It doesn't work on Opera, which is a shame, I've been using Opera for close to a decade now. But the new UI is very fluid. I had Chrome open with outlook.com just to play around with it. I loaded it into Firefox as well, no issues there either.
The new Alias feature is very cool too. I've added a slightly more professional looking @outlook.com to my regular hotmail account. One account, two addresses.
Also, while I like that it and the new contacts have gone Cosmo/Metro, they need to move skydrive and calendar over to complete the transition. And not having free imap support is going to be a deal-breaker for some people (though not a big deal for me).
There are some browsers it doesn't work on. I have an older Windows machine that has IE8 and it doesn't work there, but works fine on IE9 on my Win7 laptop. This could be a measure of security.
But the interface is nice and clean and seems to be laid out very nicely. I can see myself using it.
That 1 million figure is very bloated with Hotmail upgrades and other accounts that were already using outlook.com
Stay tuned for Office 2013. I've read a couple places now that this version of Office will have compatible android versions, AND fully sync your settings across all machines you have Office installed on. I'm looking forward to it personally.
I might actually switch over to the new service, once they have everything up and running.
edit--Just checked it out. Looks okay. Looks to be some UI appearance consistency between services, but that's not really a problem. I like the mail interface--it's very clean. Ultimately, unless there's a mass exodus from gmail (and other big providers), individuals will probably not migrate. All of my contacts are generally on gmail, and as such I have a centralized place to handle all of my communication and scheduling already.
I do like how outlook.com looks, but I would bet it has as much chance of gaining true momentum as google+ had a chance to actually displace facebook.
They already do...
Yep, I just confirmed that - it loads, but doesn't respond or anything.
Also, when will they FINALLY let me use the mobile version of hotmail/outlook using Chrome on my phone? (rather than giving me the old legacy version for hotmail, and the desktop version for outlook?) This is a major dealbreaker for me.