Tom Raftery’s Social Media

There is a post today on the Hotmail team blog called We Heard You Loud and Clear.

In the post, Richard Sim, Hotmail’s senior product manager says:

As we prepare to launch the final version of our new web mail service, we recognize the importance of ensuring that our 260+ million existing customers come over to the new service smoothly and without confusion. By adopting the name “Windows Live Hotmail”, we believe we’re bringing together the best of both worlds – new and old

Oh dear God Richard. Hotmail is a piece of crap that should have been updated or killed off years ago and it does nothing for Microsoft except serve as an embarrassment for anyone in Microsoft who is confronted with it in public.

You don’t believe me? Read my post on Hotmail and the 80+ comments by other frustrated Hotmail users on the post.

You don’t believe them, look at your main competition - Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. Check out the feature comparison put together by TechCrunch last night:

Hotmail is slow and it has no features!

Richard, the Hotmail brand is badly tarnished - take the opportunity to kill it now. Quickly and mercifully.

And for God’s sake, surely you can do a better branding job than Windows Live HotMail. Whose idea was that?

Short and snappy it ain’t. But maybe that’s not what you were going for. If not, how about “Windows (almost) Live (but really slow) HotMail (um, sorry about all the problems and lack of features)” instead?

It fits the non-snappy thing you have going on and has the advantage of being truthful. Although, considering Bill Gates’ recent performances, truth doesn’t seem to be top of Microsoft’s current agenda either.

Richard, you guys need to drop the idea of putting Windows Live in front of all your Windows Live offerings. I understand you are going for consistent branding across your Windows Live offerings but if you have poor branding why tarnish all your products with it?

Here’s a thought, how about a snappy name? Everyone else is doing it. HotMail + Live Mail + [pain of using it] = HiveMail!

Or just Live Mail. Drop the Windows and the Hotmail in one go. People would go for that.

Don’t be afraid to drop Hotmail (people don’t love it as much as you seem to think) and companies change their brands all the time. In most cases for the better.

I have written previously about Microsoft’s Hotmail and what a lame excuse for a mail platform it is - in response to that Microsoft gave an account on their new mail platform, Microsoft Live Mail and I have to say it is a serious disappointment.

One of the biggest problems with Hotmail to date has been the fact that they delete all your mail if you don’t log in for 30 days. This has caused loads of people (myself included) lots of pain as we see several years mail disappear never to be returned.

With Windows Live Mail, that 30 day login has been changed to 120 days in an effort to overcome this problem. However, the proper way to fix this would have been to allow POP access to the mail. Live Mail’s main competitors (Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) both allow this functionality. POP access means you can access the email through an email application such as Outlook or Thunderbird and as these applications poll the servers every 30 minutes or so, it means as long as they are running on your system, you are logging into the servers and will never fall foul of the 30-day limit.

Another reason to allow POP access to email is so that you can read your mail when you are not connected to the ‘Net.

Furthermore, I was made aware of another deficiency of Live Mail this weekend at BarCamp Ireland where one of the speakers bemoaned the fact that you cannot export your contacts in Live Mail! As far as I recall this was possible in Hotmail.

It seems incredible to me that Live Mail would try to lock you into a crummy application by not allowing you to export your contacts. Then again, lock-in is Microsoft’s middle name, isn’t it?