Microsoft prepping Hotmail to counter e-mail storage moves by Google
When will MSN bite the bullet and come up to par with its Hotmail competitors, particularly in the area of free e-mail storage?
For now, MSN is still offering the same 2 MB of free e-mail storage — compared to the 1 GB offered by Google's newly minted Gmail and the 100 MB now offered by Yahoo Mail. (Microsoft currently charges $60 a year for 100 MB of free Hotmail storage.)
BetaNews is reporting that MSN has pinpointed July as the target date for launching its e-mail storage counterattack.
July makes sense, as Microsoft's new fiscal year kicks off on July 1. And various MSN officials have been hinting that Microsoft is readying new Hotmail-related products for launch any time now.
Last week, Bruce Jaffe, the chief financial officer for the MSN division, told institutional investors at the Deutsche Bank Securities Media Conference in New York, to watch for Microsoft to launch a new small-business tool that makes use of Hotmail and Outlook technologies. It sounds as if this new tool will take the existing Office Outlook Connector for MSN technology a step further.
"Our first product here is going to be using Outlook that uses the Hotmail e-mail infrastructure. So you don't need to have an Exchange Server if you're a small business; you can just use Hotmail and you can have that synchronized experience, as well as the calendaring and everything else with other people who are on Hotmail. So that's taking some desk applications and services and bringing them online and marrying them with our communications back-end effort," Jaffe explained to analysts.
On Friday, BetaNews quoted Blake Irving, vice president of MSN's Communication Services Group, as saying, ""We are going to respond in a big way and will eliminate email storage as an issue for our users."
