Growing up, I remember Hotmail.com as one of the first popularized email services available to us. It was the go-to place for email, chat messenger and much more. Hot on its tail were Yahoo (with their gaming/chat messenger/email integration and AOL whose famous “You’ve Got Mail” announcement welcomed you to their portal.
The mid 2000’s marked the entry of Gmail, this no-limits, clean interface, all in one email service took the Internet by storm by marking its exclusivity in its early days by only allowing users to sign up for it via invites from friends who already possessed a Gmail account.
All of these email giants have tried to out-do each other over the years by changing their look, offering customized layouts to cater to your personality and interest, adding in more news options, games, storage sizes, improving their chat services etc. However, Gmail appeared to be unbeatable and offered everything its competitors had in a tightly integrated package.
Peter Pachal, author of the article “Email Smackdown: Outlook.com vs. Gmail” talks about the re-launch of Hotmail as the new “Outlook.com” and how it tries to compete with Gmail. As discussed in one of my previous posts, Microsoft has relaunched Hotmail at Outlook.com in hopes to revamp its image and make it appear more marketable since Hotmail was losing its popularity over the years. He expresses his concerns over how many resumes may possibly have been thrown out due to having a Hotmail.com email address instead of Gmail while applying to certain tech companies. Using Hotmail over Gmail may be deemed as old fashioned in a world where new technology (and particularly Google technology) is valued. Pachal talks about how Gmail is more user-friendly and offers security unlike Outlook.com, but he does say that it’s a good leap forward for Microsoft at attempting to rebrand their image.He also mentions that people can feel less embarrassed as Outlook sounds much better than Hotmail in today’s fast paced tech world. Most of the people in the professional world now use Gmail as their default personal email provider. Although Outlook is used in the majority of office settings and it has great features (especially the ability to recall an email), Gmail offers a comfortable look and feel, a different type of email experience.
So here are the verdicts from his analysis:
Messages - Gmail wins with its cleaner more intuitive set of capabilities (e.g. auto save, formatting, etc.) and therefore wins this bout.
Social networking integration- Draw - Both services plug in well Gmail has excellent tie-ins to Google Plus, whereas Outlook plays well to FB and Twitter
Ads - Outlook wins by serving up more relevant content in the side pane and removing ads for when you open up a message (and offering a paid service that removes ads all together.
Email has become a part of daily life, so it is important to maintain an email address with the company that has it all. When it comes to space, interface, security, games, chat, news and so much more, it’s truly Gmail for the win.
Security - Gmail wins because of its multi-factor authentication settings - however, Outlook is still in testing and might beef up these measures
Organization - Outlook - the service uses the familiar folder structure to help users categorize (with labels) and store their mail (where as Gmail's label only structure is still awkward to use)
Overall Pachal calls it a tie, and says that Outlook is still a WIP product with great potential and that there needs to be a rematch in a couple of months.
Article Link: http://mashable.com/2012/08/
14/outlook-vs-gmail/
1 comment:
This is an interesting topic. I'm interested to get some insight on Google Wave.
The creators of wave said that if email had to be invented today then it would be something like wave. However, the project died due to low consumer adoption.
Wave tried to make the email experience more collaborative and usable to share information, pictures, files, etc.
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