Gmail vs. Hotmail, a Brand War

In this day and age of electronic communicating most of us would agree that we check our emails daily; some of us keep it open all day long. Your email inbox is a tool that should be easy to use, and organized. I’ve decided to compare the two most popular ones having had experience with both.

Hotmail

Microsoft’s Hotmail has been around since July 1996, is available in 36 languages, and is supported by the most popular internet browsers: Internet Explorer, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox. Hotmail has changed its look numerous times over the years and has tried to keep up with the designs of the times. Logging in to Hotmail today is not the same as in 1996. You are first directed to a welcome page of sorts, where they advertise their latest features. I don’t like this. I’m here to see my emails, thank you very much. So I have to click on ‘inbox’ to see what’s new. The inbox is not very different to how it was in 1996, very plain and simple, yet, it seems to be lacking some form of organization. While you can create some folders for yourself, you have to move things manually, and do it all yourself. The new messages show up on top, are marked with a little yellow envelope, and are bolded. If you’re lucky your spam will be placed in your junk folder, but most new spam shows up in your inbox where you have to manually tell hotmail that this is spam for future references. They thank you for telling them that you’ve discovered new spam. Nice.

Gmail

Google’s Gmail was developed in 2003 and was open by invite only in 2004. It became available to the general public in February 2007. The Gmail service currently provides more than 7350 MB of free storage and plans to be continuously growing in capacity. Gmail is a search-oriented email service and is desinged with a one-page feel to it, where you can easily search for old emails by entering key word searches to locate them again without having to go through your inbox yourself. The interface is very user friendly, and, might I add, good-looking. You can change the theme of your inbox with very nice background designs that sometimes change according to the weather, the time of day, or the season. Probably the best feature of Gmail is its email organization and grouping features. Let’s say you’re having a conversation with someone over back and forth emails. Gmail will group all of those emails into one single email that reads as a forum of email conversations. If there are multiple people reponding to a group email, they will also stay in the one email, but will be color coded for each individual. This is especially great for planning and organizing events because you’ll receive responses regarding availabilities, and this won’t cause your inbox to be flooded. Gmail also has a ‘star’ feature, where you can place a star on important emails so that they’ll stand out, and, are quickly found again when you need them. You can also place tags on your emails, so that if you get emails from say Ebay, they’ll automatically be placed in your ‘Ebay’ folder and won’t be seen in your inbox. When you’re actually involved in a purchase or sale, you’ll know go to your Ebay folder. This way, you won’t have to keep seeing their listing discount offers, without having to block them as spam. It’s very useful.

In my opinion there is no competition between Hotmail and Gmail. Gmail wins hands down.  I use Gmail for my main emails and will never switch back to Hotmail.

I still use a Hotmail account. For spam. If a store or certain web services ask for my email, I’ll give them the hotmail email so that I don’t have to see their crap. I rarely check my hotmail, but when I do, I see all those nice store discount emails and lots of extra spam.

It’s rare that I get spam in my main inbox with Gmail; the emails are for me. In addition, my mom is able to use Gmail, but never really took off with Hotmail. She learnt it on her own, and that’s saying something because she is not technologically inclined in the least.

Now we just need to get those pesky devoted Hotmail users to see the light and join Gmail. 

Go Google!

~Ashes~