As a free webmail service with over 350 million users, Windows Live Hotmail has placed the world's most popular web-based e-mail service while Yahoo! Mail and Gmail hold records for the 2nd and 3rd places respectively. In full, Hotmail is referred to as 'Windows Live Hotmail' which was formerly referred to as 'MSN Hotmail'. It represents Microsoft's version of webmail. But, it was not the Microsoft who invented it.
It was originally launched as 'Hotmail' by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1996 as one of the first free web-based mail service. Sabeer Bhatia used to work as a hardware engineer at the Apple Company. But, to everyone's surprise, he left it just after 9 months to start a business of his own. It was Jack Smith who then gave the idea of starting a free webmail service to which Bhatia assigned 'HoTMaiL' when working with HTML pages during its construction.
Within its first year, over a million of clients had registered for Hotmail. Meanwhile, Microsoft eyeing for its version of webmail identified the potential in Hotmail and offered a deal of 160 million dollars which was carefully rejected by Bhatia. In a matter of months, the deal was completed for 400 million dollars and the service was renamed as 'MSN Hotmail'Initially it provided 2MB free storage space per account which is now over 5GB free storage and over 10GB paid storage. While Hotmail ranked first, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail proves worth competition with 300 million and 200 million users respectively.
No comments:
Post a Comment