Outlook Officially Launches – With 60m Already Using It

Microsoft’s Outlook web mail service has finally come out of preview, aqnd Microsoft says 60 million people are already using it – which signals the imminent passing of the much-maligned Hotmail client.

Over the coming months, Microsoft is planning to migrate Hotmail users to the Outlook web client, named after the personal information manager included in the Microsoft Office suite – and the public will have to put up with a “large-scale marketing effort” on the email service.

A positive Outlook

“It’s been just over 6 months since the Outlook.com preview released and the reception to date has greatly surpassed our expectations; over 60 million people already actively using Outlook.com,” said David Law, of the Microsoft Office team, in a blog post.

“A number of people have expressed appreciation that Outlook.com replaces advertising with the latest updates from Facebook or Twitter when they’re reading email from one of their contacts. In fact on average, people saw 60 percent fewer ads when using Outlook.com because they’re now getting much more relevant updates from their friends.”

Launched last year, Outlook was designed to offer a cleaner, smoother experience than Hotmail and other clients. Most changes were aesthetic, with a cleaner interface and less intrusive advertising.

The email market should actually get interesting in the coming months, with Yahoo planning a major offensive and Google adding plenty of features to Gmail, such as bringing messages into search.

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Originally published on eWeek.