Microsoft officially terminated Hotmail WAY back in 2013.
The email service, once the world’s most popular, had a spectacular fall from grace following the rise of a new, fresher form of mass-email.
And that email service was, of course, Gmail.
Outlook is The NEW Hotmail
Microsoft has switched its every-man email service from Hotmail over to Outlook, a process that took a while but eventually turned out rather successful.
Microsoft now has over 400 million active Outlook users, and it netted 60 million in the first six months of the transition.
Microsoft auto-updated all of its Hotmail accounts during this period, some 350 million, and has managed to add in an additional 50 million since 2013.
Not bad. Especially when you consider just how dominant Gmail is these days.
Why Gmail is So Popular
Simple, really: Android and Google services.
Google, for many people, is the web.
Whether you’re talking about their phone, their search software, their email, their cloud – A LOT of people do all of this exclusively inside Google’s ecosystem.
Android is the most popular mobile platform on the planet, and to run an Android phone, well… you need a Google email.
See what they did there?
Gmail vs Hotmail
Beyond this, Google also built an email service that actually worked too. And this was key.
Hotmail was never great. It didn’t get much attention, and like Microsoft and BlackBerry’s mobile phone operating systems, it wasn’t hard for Google to come up with something better.
Gmail is to Hotmail, what Android is to Windows Mobile – better, slicker, easier to use, more useful.
Biggest Email Client of ALL?
Apple’s iPhone email app, surprisingly.
It is the most used email app on the planet (as of 2017) with a 28% market share.
Gmail is in second with 26%, while Outlook lays in fifth with 6%, according to Litmus.
Outlook is Microsoft’s Future
Outlook is growing and, thanks to cloud support and Skype, is one of the more useful, all-inclusive email clients around right now.
Apple’s email, for instance, is truly awful. I use an iPhone and I hate Apple’s email client – it is woefully bad.
Microsoft’s attempts at refining and improving the user experience of its email client is certainly paying off.
However, Gmail is still the world’s #1 email client. By quite a margin.
In 2017 alone, webmail open rates in Gmail were up 25%.
Similarly, webmail open rates in Outlook were down by 4%.
Most Popular Outlook Versions
- Outlook 2016 – 38%
- Outlook 2010 – 23%
- Outlook 2013 – 21%
- Outlook 2007 – 10%
- Outlook 2000-2003 – 7%
