Microsoft Live Mail Beta

This morning, when I accessed my hotmail account, I noticed a small link that prompted to to try the new Microsoft Live Mail Beta. The Microsoft Live concept is what essentially amounts to something that aims to be a personalized homepage feature that Yahoo and Google already have, and Mail Beta is, in essence, Microsoft Outlook Web Access in a beta format.

Some of the implementation -- such as the preview pane -- doesn't work quite as slickly as it potentially can, mostly due to performance (network, web server) issues, but a dashboard approach to mail is definitely a vast improvement over the old school Hotmail navigation design; it minimizes the number of pages you need to go through to pull the same information as you would on a nice, single portal-like view of your mailbox.

It's definitely a big step in the right direction for Hotmail to keep up, or even get ahead of its Internet email competitors. Actually, it's also interesting that although my email address is still under hotmail domain, all Hotmail branding is completely eradicated from the new mail interface, and it's now a big WINDOWS mail. Sure it's a truth that's been known for years, but it just feels a bit weird to finally see it so blatantly marketed this way.

Now, having said that, I think that the Hotmail folks ("Ah-hem!" I mean, Microsoft) is going a bit too far in patting themselves in the back here.

"Be sure to thank yourself for these new features?"

What do you mean?

Ah, you mean: We're finally letting you have some of these features that other email services offered for years... for those of you who do not fall immediately onto your knees and thank the Microsoft gods for their gracious generousity... "no soup for you!"

Oh, I definitely want that soup... thanks, Microsoft!