Hotmail, abandoned by millions due to it’s high level of spam, is getting new life. It’s been their “beta bed” for a long time now, and office live gives it a chance to shine – brightly. What free email service features are important to users? How can you get them to be a primary user? How do you not alienate them? Well, after an hour-long discussion at a status meeting last month, the Hotmail redesign really boiled down to one key decision: one big ad, or two?
After months of reworking the venerable Web mail program, Microsoft’s team had made all the easy fixes: They’d added more colors and even offered a way to make the new Windows Live Mail look just like the old Hotmail.
But sitting around a table in the nondescript Pyre conference room in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley offices, the half-dozen developers and managers couldn’t avoid the thorny issue that remained. A significant number of people believed that the new design had too much space devoted to ads, making it hard to use some of the mail program’s new features.
The ad placement decision may seem minor. But it’s a key one for Microsoft, which is trying to turn Hotmail’s hundreds of millions of casual e-mail users into customers for a wide variety of Windows Live personal services.
Offer too many ads and the company risks alienating users and sending them flocking to rival online services. But if it forsakes the second ad, it risks choking the revenue the business needs to compete with the likes of Yahoo and Google.
“Removing one of those ad products is a very costly thing,” product planner Richard Sim told his colleagues during a meeting about the ad issue, among others. But in the end, everyone knew what had to be done. Painful as it was, they had to side with their users and hope the dollars would be there.
It’s a big bet for Microsoft, which has spent the past two years overhauling Hotmail into what is now dubbed Windows Live Mail. After years of leaving the e-mail service largely on autopilot, Microsoft was jolted into action on April Fools’ Day 2004, when Google launched Gmail, a Web-based e-mail service with a gigabyte of free storage. Since then, Microsoft has been racing to catch up.
Source: CNET News.com
