HUA HIN, Thailand - Love it or hate
it, Microsoft's Hotmail is still one of the most
widely used email services, with more than 320
million users. This week the software giant
announced the mother of all makeovers to the
platform, with a plan to phase out the Hotmail
moniker in favor of Outlook.com and integrate a
number of social feeds and functions into a new
breed of inbox.
"Email is becoming less
and less useful as inboxes become cluttered with
newsletters and social updates, and people
increasingly keep up their personal connections in
social networks instead of their email address
books," said Microsoft's corporate vice president
of Windows Live, Chris Jones.
The new
revamped, Facebook-friendly, Outlook email service
replaced Hotmail's cluttered, ad-filled pages on
Tuesday as users
were welcomed with a
cleaner, slicker interface to manage their mail.
The layout embraces Microsoft's Metro interface
and is very easy to navigate. Naturally it
integrates seamlessly with other services such as
SkyDrive, Live Messenger and Skype.
The
target is rival system Gmail. Google's email
service has rapidly taken huge chunks out of a
market once dominated by Microsoft and Yahoo.
According to research firm ComScore, Gmail now has
around 31% of the market, Yahoo has remained
static on 32%, while Hotmail still holds on to a
slender lead with 36% of the global market share.
Free webmail services, particularly
Hotmail, which was launched in 1996, have suffered
from deluges of spam, phishing and hacking
attempts, and automatically proliferating malware,
often resulting in the temporary suspension of
email accounts. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google all
employ highly stringent spam filters, which
usually also block a significant percentage of
genuine email.
It is too early to tell
whether the new Outlook.com email platform, not to
be confused with the Office application, will
suffer the problems that plagued Hotmail. What can
be confirmed though is that Microsoft is gunning
for Google and email appears to be the weapon of
choice.
New functionality such as
displaying photos and attachments as a slideshow,
editing Office documents within the browser, seven
gigabytes of storage, category filtered graymail
(newsletters, social updates etc), and discrete
ads are all advantages over Gmail.
Google
has already been in hot water over privacy when it
was discovered that Gmail scanned the content of
emails and spawned ads based on what was in them.
Microsoft has said it will not scan emails, so it
is unclear how it will target the ads it does run
next to users' inboxes.
Ads or not, the
resemblance to the Gmail layout is striking,
suggesting that winning back former users is the
strategy for Microsoft. The key to Outlook.com's
success, rather than social network gimmicks, is
likely to revolve around how it deals with spam,
genuine messages, and security threats since no
free email provider has managed to get this
balance right.
Industry The epic
US courtroom battle between Apple and Samsung
raged on this week as lawyers got richer and
technology innovation suffered at the hands of the
two patent trolls.
Apple is still claiming
that Samsung "slavishly copied" its designs for
the iPad, by this the company is referring to a
rectangular design, rounded edges and even the
color.
As ludicrous as this claim may
seem, it is holding up in court, and judges are
seriously considering banning products that look
similar to those produced by Apple. Product
designers at the company took to the floor this
week to defend their employer and claim that rival
companies, specifically Samsung, had "ripped them
off in an offensive manner" and "copied the entire
design and user experience" of Apple products.
Defending lawyers retorted that "Everyone
is out there with that basic form factor. Samsung
is not some copyist, some Johnny-come-lately doing
knockoffs."
The form factor refers to the
generally rectangular shape, with no sharp edges,
of tablet computers and smart-phones.
Some
of Samsung's evidence was rejected by the judges
for being a late submission, so the company
decided to take it to the press instead for the
public to decide. The missing evidence claimed
that Sony's designs predated Apple's idea for the
iPhone. Samsung also released a statement to
the media stating that it "was not allowed to tell
the jury the full story and show the pre-iPhone
design for that and other phones that were in
development at Samsung in 2006, before the iPhone.
The excluded evidence would have established
beyond doubt that Samsung did not copy the iPhone
design."
Apple naturally argued that the
leaked evidence was a deliberate attempt to
influence the trial and may have been seen by
jurors, resulting in a prejudiced verdict. Judge
Lucy Koh ordered the Korean electronics giant to
file a brief explaining its actions.
The
courtroom conflict is likely to drag on for
several weeks; its ramifications throughout the
industry could echo for years, especially if the
ruling goes Apple's way.
Patent litigation
is on the rise. According to InformationWeek a
total of 2,150 companies had to defend themselves
5,842 times against patent suits in the US in
2011, at a direct cost of around US$29 billion.
The figure represents over 10% of the $250 billion
devoted by all US business to research and
development.
The winner may be the tech
giant that gets a huge payout and an even tighter
grip on its market monopoly. The losers in the
long run will be the smaller companies innovating
and developing tomorrow's technology, the industry
and economy in general, and you, the consumer.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times
Online correspondent based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
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