Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In a move to get more people to try its sleek email app Outlook.com, Microsoft has smartly added Google to its list of chat services, joining Facebook and Skype chat.

Microsoft recently announced that Outlook.com now has more than 400 million active accounts following the migration of all Hotmail users over to Outlook.com. The rebranding and redesign that occurred from Hotmail to Outlook.com was necessary because Hotmail had struggled to find new users after Gmail started gobbling them up. Those moves clearly paid off.

Now, to bring even people over to Outlook.com, Microsoft is adding Google Talk functionality.

“As a part of making Outlook.com personal, we believe people choose to use many different services and our role is to help them connect to the people who matter most, wherever they are,” Douglas Pearce, the group program manager for connected services, wrote in a blog post today.

To add Google contacts, open up the Messaging pane in Outlook.com and there will be a dialog prompt to “Add people to chat with Google contacts.” Once you have access, you’re all set. If you ever want to change the connection settings, you can do so at you Live profile page.

Users of Microsoft cloud storage service SkyDrive will also get the benefit of Google chat. This could especially come in handy if you want to work on a document and chat with colleagues at the same time.

“If you’re working together on a document with a Google friend, you can be chatting with them at the same time without leaving SkyDrive,” Pearce wrote. “You can even share a link to the document and edit it together in real time.”

Google functionality in Outlook.com and SkyDrive chat will roll out to all users during the next few days. Take a look at chat in SkyDrive below.

Photos via Microsoft

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s decision to get rid of Hotmail and replace it with Outlook.com appears to have paid off. With all Hotmail users now migrated to Outlook.com, Microsoft says it now has more than 400 million active accounts on the well-designed email service.

Outlook.com launched to positive reviews back in July 2012. A few months ago, Outlook.com exited preview with 60 million registered users. But the brunt of the work wasn’t done at that point because it still needed to move its many Hotmail users over to Outlook.com.

Microsoft said it migrated 150 petabytes of email in six weeks. The company writes in a blog post:

When Outlook.com came out of preview in February, it already had more than 60 million active accounts. However, Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts. This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented. This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes–equaling more than 150 million gigabytes of data–and making sure that every person’s mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade. Of course, this had to be done with a live site experience that was handling billions of transactions a day. With your help, we were able to do all of that in just about 6 weeks. We’ve spent the last few weeks ensuring that everything was completed in line with our high quality expectations.

On the mobile front, things appear to be looking up for the email service. Microsoft said Outlook.com now has 125 million users that access it regularly on mobile devices.

One thing I find funny about this announcement is that Microsoft previously would not share its internal number of active Hotmail accounts. When I wrote about how Gmail had become the largest email service in the world with 425 million accounts back in June 2012, Microsoft refused to say how many active Hotmail accounts there were. Instead, it referred me to third-party numbers from comScore. (As did Yahoo.)

But now that Microsoft has internal metrics it likes and a service that works (and looks) better than Hotmail, it’s clearly time to boast.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft really wants its Outlook.com email app to pick up new users. Its solution? Attack the hell out of Google’s incredibly popular Gmail service.

In November, Microsoft tried to go after Google’s credibility by claiming that Google Shopping results were all advertisements rather than fair comparisons of products around the web. Now it appears Microsoft is going after an even meatier target than Google Shopping by attacking Gmail.

The new Scroogled.com site from Microsoft makes the case that Gmail snoops on all of your emails to serve you better ads.

“Google goes through every Gmail that’s sent or received, looking for keywords so they can target Gmail users with paid ads,” the site claims. “And there’s no way to opt out of this invasion of your privacy.”

Some of what Microsoft is saying is true. Google does scan email keywords so it can contextually serve you advertising. However, it is clearly lying when it says there is no way opt out. As Marketing Land points out, you can not have Google reading your emails by using the basic HTML version of Gmail, using a third-party email client, or paying $50 a year for Google Apps and opting out that way.

Google has previously addressed privacy issues by saying that it walks a careful line between protecting users and serving ads.

“There is what I call the creepy line,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said in 2010 at the Washington Ideas Forum. “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

And even as Google has addressed these issues, Gmail’s many users haven’t felt the need to leave. Google claims to have more than 425 million active monthly users on Gmail.

As an alternative, Microsoft is pushing its Outlook.com service, which is debuted in mid-2012 as a replacement to Hotmail. The site’s ad copy reads:

Outlook.com prioritizes your privacy. You won’t see ads based on keywords from your personal email. Your email is nobody else’s business. But Google makes it their business. Even if you’re not a Gmail user, Google still goes through your personal email sent to Gmail and uses the content to sell ads.

Our own testing of Outlook.com showed that it is a smart, modern service, but is harping about Gmail’s privacy enough to get people to switch?

Screenshot via Scroogled.com