I found out that Hotmail just turned 22 today.
Hotmail was one of the great innovations that sparked the first internet revolution in the 1990s. At that time, the internet was obviously slow, and email was ISP based – that means provided by the company that gave you internet access.
Hotmail was the first email service that allowed you to create and view with your browser from anywhere, thus freeing you from being tied to any specific provider.
I was a happy first user then, and believe it or not, it offered two megabytes of free storage only. These two megabyte is total storage – not single.
Nowadays, we complain because an attachment is easily more than 10 megabytes, and we complain why it is rejected. Back then, we had two megabytes for all the messages we received and stored. We had to keep deleting older messages.
Hotmail became successful by a very simple viral message – when the user used it, it would automatically add a byline to the email it sent in the signature saying, “Want free email? Go to Hotmail.com.”
Within a year or so, it attracted rapidly over 8.5 million users and on December 1997, Microsoft bought Hotmail for a then unimaginable high sum of $400 million – for a free email service that earned nothing.
Competition arrived when Yahoo also introduced their email in 1997, and Google introduced Gmail in 2004. At that time, Google tried to make waves by offering a staggering one gigabyte of storage for free.
Microsoft did not do so well in growing it, even with its first mover advantage. In 2005, they rebranded it as Live Mail, and in 2012, changed the name further to Outlook.com.
In contrast to the earlier years, Hotmail also lost to Yahoomail in the Philippines.
There was a time when almost all the people we corresponded with in the Philippines used Yahoo, if not their office email. By 2017, it was reported that while Gmail had over a billion accounts, Outlook.com had less than 500 million.
However, it was not only losing in the number of accounts. Obviously, the Gmail users were also more active. According to Litmus research, as of December 2017, the number of webmail market share had Gmail with over 26 percent, while Outlook.com had only four percent, and Yahoo Mail only two percent.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that the three richest persons on earth were from the technology industry.
The richest is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, followed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and then Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Erstwhile leader, Warren Buffet, slid down to fourth place as he keeps giving his wealth away.
It is worthwhile to note that according to Bloomberg, out of the 500 richest individuals they track, more than one-fifth or 20 percent of them earned their wealth through technology.