ryan kennedy’s blog

Microsoft has announced their update to Hotmail, Kahuna. It’s about damn time. Before Excite went under, I switched my email account to Hotmail because I knew my Excite mail account would be migrated to iWon. iWon wasn’t going to use any of the software I’d helped to write at Excite, so I decided I was going to bail my excite.com address. At the time, Hotmail was the big dog in webmail. They had a nicer UI and far better features.

Things have changed. Hotmail has remained mostly stagnant. It still looks and feels like the same Hotmail I switched to back in 2001. Meanwhile, virtually every other webmail provider has been hitting the gym to pump up their offering. This is part of the reason why when I joined Yahoo!, I moved mail accounts from Hotmail to Y!. Y! is no longer the ugly duckling of webmails (it really did look like crap back in 2000/2001) and the feature set it provides is amazing.

Jump back two and a half weeks to our announcement of the new Oddpost-powered Y! Mail. This isn’t just a facelift, this is a brand new Y! Mail. Now add Hotmail to the mix in doing a major overhaul with rich DHTML features (I’m sure we can expect to see features from their Exchange web client), AOL with their DHTML client (it sucks, in my opinion), EarthLink with their Flash client (an interesting first stab) and GMail with their seasoned, light, DHTML UI and you’ve got a recipe for the next webmail turf war.

Personally, I can’t wait and I hope the other competitors bring as much enthusiasm to this battle as Y! will. In this competition for market share, the users are the ones who ultimately win.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 8:41 am and is filed under Unfiled. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.