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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."
A company registers "hotmail.com" as a play on "HMTL" and "mail", back when it was oh so cool that you can make a web page that looks like an email client! It's like mail, but it's HTML, i.e. HoTMaiL! Get it? It's "HTML", and it's "mail"- i.e. "hot-mail"! WOW!
(Although I have to admit, that like many people, I just assumed the name was pornographic when I first heard it.)
So anyway, Microsoft buys this company, promptly screws it up with all the ill-conceived MSN/Passport/.NET crud, and now they're going to redesign the entire interface to look just like Outlook. Can you imagine? It completely flies in the face of everything that drove people to Hotmail in the first place! You could use an ordinary web browser to read your email as if you were surfing the web. You didn't have to run a mail client like Outlook. Now your IE is going to instantiate an ActiveX control or something and you'll basically be running Outlook again, only inside your browser, so it's going to be even less stable than before. It's like the entire design philosophy behind Hotmail has made a 180 degree turn since the Microsoft acquisition.