Microsoft Not Dropping Hotmail Name

EveryNickIsTaken writes "CNET News.com is reporting that despite planning for months to ditch the name 'Hotmail' for 'Windows Live Mail,' Microsoft will keep the Hotmail name, renaming the service 'Windows Live Hotmail.' Along with the slight name change, MS will be modifying the interface to look more like Outlook's GUI."

Comments

Hotmail hotmail hotmail, how you trouble me!

[AbRASiON]

I might take this opportunity to plug a blog I'm currently working on, trying to get Microsoft to manage their passport.net / hotmail / xbox live syncing / linking a little better.
(no, there's no ads on there)
I wouldn't say it's well written, nor would I say it's a major issue but it is an annoyance.
http://msnemailchange.blogspot.com/

To quickly summarise, Microsoft has a policy where if you have a passport.net account to log in to some of their services, you can't change your login / backend email if you opted to chose a hotmail account, quite the frustrating if you simply don't want to use hotmail anymore.

On top of that, those of us who own an Xbox 1 or Xbox 360 and use live can get frustrated that the live "gamertag" is permanently bound to a passport.net id which we may no longer want to use (be it avoiding people on MSN, sick of hotmail's email interface or simply want to use another email address)

To my knowledge several other Microsoft web "products" use these live id's / passports but how well they integrate with passport.net / liveid I don't know - I believe there's a myspace kind of clone and also Zune owners need a passport - however, don't quote me on that.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's more integration with Vista too, perhaps the messenger package installed as default, however that one is also speculation.

So just to finalize my comment, yes I realize it's my own fault using MS's products and well yeah it's not a real major issue but it's annoying and could be handled a lot better, if anyone has any information on this, specifically names within MS / Xbox divisions for me to question, I'd appreciate it.

and yes, I'm new to starting one of these ranty style pages so it's a mess, sorry all.

- Scott

Re:What an ironic travesty this is

[mikael]

It's like the entire design philosophy behind Hotmail has made a 180 degree turn since the Microsoft acquisition.

Windows NT was originally sold on the basis that it would offer all applications developers and users the opportunity to develop and use applications that all have the same standard user interface everywhere, and thus UNIX was legacy.

Windows XP was sold on on the basis that all applications developers could customise the look of their applications with "skins".