Microsoft splatters Hotmail with even more updates
That's a lotta lipstick
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Microsoft has plastered Hotmail with yet more updates, after customers continued to complain about the firm’s recent shaky overhaul of its free web email service.
The software vendor didn’t want to draw too much attention to those gripes, by instead saying it had responded to user “feedback”.
But since the re-launch of Hotmail this summer, the company has repeatedly applied patches to the live service.
Many have reasonably complained that Microsoft failed to adequately test the product before rolling it out to all its customers.
Worse still, the firm sunk plenty of ad cash into the makeover – which clearly showed that MS had lots of faith in its new-look Hotmail at release in June.
Sadly, Hotmail customers have struggled to agree with Microsoft’s enthusiasm about the service. The result? Updates aplenty.
“We’ve kept ourselves busy this summer,” said the company’s Hotmail group program manager Dick Craddock.
“Following this release, you may have noticed a string of smaller updates. Some were planned, like push email, calendar, and contacts through Exchange ActiveSync, but others were the results of feedback we received and acted on during the rollout.
“We put a lot of time and effort into careful planning, but we also recognise that with any release, we can improve, so we do our best to listen closely and respond actively to feedback.”
Yet more features were pummelled into Hotmail yesterday.
Microsoft began a worldwide push of its 10GB photo-sharing tool in its SkyDrive cloud storage service, which is bolted onto Hotmail, yesterday. Previously the feature was only made available to US customers.
The full list of tweaks can be viewed here. ®
COMMENTS
Still got a Hotmail account, but Gmail is kind enough to bring me its messages
“We’ve kept ourselves busy this summer,” said the company’s Hotmail group program manager Dick Craddock.
Would that be the new busy?
Opinion
One pet hate of mine is companies that roll out new, untested services, telling us how exciting and wonderful they are, and completely remove any chance of the old one surviving. Before it even happens, they *KNOW* they will never roll back to the old. This it's not a test, it's an enforced change.
For an enforced change, the replacement has to be equivalent or better than the original, which means lots and lots and lots of voluntary user testing FIRST. A couple of engineers going "Yeah, works pretty much the same, I think" is not adequate for a service with millions of users.
Then, when you see what the changes actually ARE you wonder why they bothered. I mean, even now the changes are:
"Track packages referenced in your email from Hotmail" - UPS / FedEx integration. Useless to me as I'm not in the US. Plus it doesn't work for the over several dozen couriers. Plus it doesn't actually do anything useful, because you're relying on a FedEx / UPS link being in the email, which is going to be - shock, horror - one or two clicks away from a package tracking page for that parcel.
"Chat with Facebook friends in Hotmail" - isn't that what Facebook is for? Why do I need to sellotape all my sites together? Can't I just have Facebook open in one tab and Hotmail in another and not have to worry about typing my email into a Facebook chat? Plus, this is actually a MESSENGER feature, not a Hotmail one. I have a Facebook account, I use it for IM, I have a Hotmail account (basically a spam-trap), I use my Messenger account for IM. Pidgin already integrates both so I don't need this feature and if I did want to use a HTTP site to view IM's, I'd use the one that's provided by the IM provider - i.e. Facebook.
"Share photos more easily with expanded coverage and new features" - - i.e. larger attachment sizes and larger total email sizes. Useful feature. But still people don't send huge files by email unless it's necessary because the RECIPIENT / TRANSIT is the problem, not the sender. Sod receiving a 10Gb email from a Hotmail user - most mailservers will just say "No thanks."
"Earlier this summer we helped people save time by viewing Hulu and YouTube videos within any email containing a link to content on those sites."
See FedEx tracking points - because if the link is in the email, why do I need Hotmail to automatically open it for me? Can't I just click it and go to Youtube?
"Organize and find important email with Subfolders" - Holy cow! Alert the press! Subfolders!
Hotmail was a killer app once. The first, true, serious webmail site that worked. It lost that moniker years ago with it's constant "redesigns", unnecessary integrations, blocking Outlook integration with a Plus account (which I had for several years), crappy HTML/Javascript that never works properly in Opera (always the first browser to break on Hotmail), and still it can't spot simple spam.
Want to get customers back? Provide a clean, small HTML inteface (ala GMail Simple Mode), provide nice basic features and not crowd my browser space with unnecessary crap while I'm trying to read my email, and stop redesigning the damn thing every ten minutes and not providing a "Classic View" option.
Still can't do the most basic things right
The most annoying feature of Hotmail is that after deleting an email, instead of returning to the Inbox it displays the next message. I've hated this for years, I've hated it in Outlook, I hate it everywhere.
Every time Hotmail announces a "major" revamp I go check whether they have made this stupid behavior optional, discover that they haven't, and go back to forwarding my hotmail to gmail.
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