Quote Originally Posted by HuangLao View Post
What was the politics behind the broad and dramatic change, Harry? I refer to the technical politics of it all.
This transfer of all Hotmail and later live.com accounts to outlook didn't take place yesterday, but came about a few years ago - depending on locale. And a greater percentage still retain [technically] @hotmail address -

I believe, in the day, hotmail might have been the most commonly used email service with millions upon millions of accounts worldwide, as it was the most promoted and available of the mainstream commercial networks. Somewhere along the line, Microsoft stumbled and lost to more accessible and easier to use commercial types [gmail, aol, yahoo among others] and then when they fucked around around with the first change of @live.com which eventually morphed onto what is now Outlook


Microsoft doesn't have a keen reputation for public changes - software, OS, browsers, email services, etc -
They bought Hotmail from someone else. There was probably a ton of shit old legacy code they didn't want to rewrite or maintain.

Live.com was supposed to be their big User Portal to everything.

But the Exchange team, who wrote Active Directory as well, obviously decided to move the whole thing onto the Internet, so Outlook won.

That would be my guess.