Hotmail Misses Its Own Deadline.
Years ago, Hotmail was
awesome. You could sign up for a free email account that didn't change
with your ISP, and access it from anywhere. You could even link your
Hotmail account to other pop3 accounts and read them all in one web
enabled spot! One of the survivors of the dot-com bust, Hotmail stayed
afloat by offering great service and and using it's first rate status to
bring in advertisers and eventually get bought by Microsoft.
After the bubble burst, Microsoft, to its credit, did not shutter the free email service and switch completely to paid accounts. However, over the years it has severely limited the space and functionality of its free accounts, finally squeezing free users down to 2 megabytes of space. At that small a threshold, everyone has to clean out their account regularly and keep signing in to make sure they don't get cut off and miss important emails.
It was time for a successor
to the free email throne to appear, and Microsoft's able rival in the
"search engine wars," Google, stepped up to the plate with an audacious
offer: virtually unlimited storage for free, keep your email forever and
search it quickly and effectively.
Not willing to be trumped by Google's new free email offering, Gmail, which is now in the process of a slow and steady roll out to new users via "invites" to join the beta test, Hotmail has announced that they are making storage a "non-issue" by allowing their free customers 250 megabytes of space. The announcement comes with promises of better spam and virus filtering and other upgrades to the service.
250 megabytes isn't great, but to be honest, it's enough to get me to keep my account. If they come through with it before Gmail comes online, that is.
Two weeks ago, on July 8th, Hotmail Staff sent out a message to all users detailing the changes. It also promised more communication "within two weeks." Today, two weeks later, I eagerly opened my email and was excited to find another message from Hotmail.
Dear MSN Hotmail Member, Your MSN Hotmail account is approaching the 2 MB storage limit. You need to take immediate action to avoid losing messages!Increasing user storage space by nearly a factor of 8 is no small feat, and I understand that it will take time for Microsoft to upgrade its underlying systems appropriately, but they themselves promised communication within a certain time frame, and then failed to deliver.
If your e-mail account reaches the 2 MB limit, you.ll be sent a second notification. You must then reduce the size of your e-mail account within five days. If you do not, some of your messages will be automatically deleted and cannot be recovered.
In the meantime, they've successfully rolled out the new 2gb storage limit to at least some of their paid users.
Although I'm excited for my Hotmail account to be useful once again, Microsoft has a history of making the service subtly more and more annoying to use, and then offering to "fix" those problems if I just pony up the cash.
Although that may make for a viable business model when you're the only real player in the market, when there's other choices, annoying people isn't going to get them to buy a real account, it's going to get them to leave.
