Microsoft holds on to Hotmail after all

By Tom Sanders on Feb 9, 2007 1:36 PM
Filed under Software

Windows Live Hotmail preferred over Windows Live Mail.

Microsoft has decided to hold on to the Hotmail brand for its online email service.

The software developer originally was planning to retire the brand and replace it with Windows Live Mail. The mail service now will be called Windows Live Hotmail, Richard Sim, a senior product manager with Microsoft disclosed on a company blog.

The new brand will show up in the public version of the mail beta in the coming weeks.

"We […] found that many users were extremely loyal to the Hotmail brand and perceived the beta as an upgrade to Hotmail. In fact, our most loyal users have been very happy with Hotmail for years and while they loved the improvements in the beta, some were a bit confused by name change," Sim explained the reasoning behind the name change.

Windows Live Hotmail is Microsoft's next generation online email service. Based on Asynchronous Javascript and XML (Ajax) technology, it aims to deliver an email application that behaves in a similar fashion to a desktop email client.