I finally am part of the Mail Beta (codenamed Kahuna)!! I might even start to use my Hotmail account again instead of GMail.. *Gasp* The User Interface is cleaner and faster. I love the 3-pane Outlook style. But there still is a long ways to go. I can’t use my arrow keys to browse through e-mail. I can’t choose the number of e-mails to display per page. You still can’t search your mail. And I couldn’t get it to auto-refresh with new incoming mail. It feels like there are a ton of features not yet implemented (that are in the existing Hotmail). I hope the Kahuna team has a ton of features up their sleeve that they’re just not releasing to the public yet. Yes, the mail beta is a huge step in the right direction, but it’s not really that impressive. (Now if they released it earlier and made it as feature rich as Outlook Web Access, that would be so awesome.) Normally I would say "too little; too late", but in this case it’s more like "a little; pretty late (but-fortunately-not-too-late)".
Rant: It frustrates me how slow products can move sometimes. Obviously rewriting Hotmail is a massive undertaking with I-don’t-know-how-many hundreds of millions of users to support. Google came out with GMail on April 1st 2004. At the time, Hotmail was this big, clunky, cluttered system. (Today it is still a big, clunky, cluttered e-mail client.) Only over a month and a half later did the Hotmail team decide to rewrite Hotmail from scratch. And only over a year and half after GMail came out, will Hotmail release their version (which, of course, will be seen as "a copy/imitation".) Now working in a large company, I can completely understand how things tend to move slowly (although I don’t really understand why it moves slowly). Unfortunately moving slowly in this industry means that you are heading towards extinction–someone else will out innovate you. There is a certain amount of pristige that comes with doing things first. I just don’t think SteveB’s motto works anymore: "We like to be first, but when we’re not first we want to be the first to make it cool, and if we’re not the first to make it cool we want to be the first to make money off of it." (or something to that effect).
Random: MSN is finally starting to understand the power of the Beta Invite model and viral marketing. Google, obviously, has been a master of this for quite a while. Microsoft tends to do better under competition.
Disclaimer (again): I hope I haven’t sounded overly bitter. Obviously anything I write here is just my personal opinion and definitely does not represent the views of my employer or anyone else, for that matter. I don’t work on anything that has anything to do with Hotmail so I have no insight/insider information on that team. Me being frustrated at the slow pace of some things is probably applicable to all large companies (I wouldn’t know because I haven’t worked in any other large company). I don’t know.
I do know that my views are distorted as someone working in the tech industry. A regular Joe Schmo off the street thinks as highly of Microsoft (probably more so) than Google. In fact there are many many people that don’t use GMail. So take my rant for what it’s worth (not much).
Darn. How did a post about Kahuna become a long-winded rant?? I apologize. Go Kahuna!
They look like this, except with the front cover and flag painted baby blue, with the "Windows Live Mail" logo on the side.
red hot place 