Since the debut of Gmail, it seems that Microsoft gave up the good fight.
It (Microsoft) didn’t take Google seriously – again! – and decided to use their old worn-out playbook.
They initialized Stage One, ignore Google, because, well, they were Microsoft, and Google was this gnat, while Hotmail was the Grand Puba of web-based email services, with over 400 million users.
Gmail gained a foothold.
Then Microsoft went to Stage Two, known as The Myopia of The Dominant Incumbency.
Hotmail and Gmail were both ignored. In fact, apart from silly piecemeal infrastructure upgrades, the Hotmail user experience remained mired in the late 1990s.
Gmail kept kicking along, with upgrades and updates happening at a furious pace, since Google was aware that their bread-and-butter search business was being greatly enhanced buttered by the enhanced scroggling of users’ email that Gmail afforded them.
Before you knew it, Google's Gmail dolchstosslegende was complete, as far as word-of-mouth, and the ever important perception was concerned.
Meanwhile, Gmail wasn’t even the most widely used email service!
While I was OTG this past week, I read that Microsoft’s rebranded Hotmail, now called Outlook.com, and powered by Microsoft Exchange (I think), has now come up with an automatic way to help wean Gmail users off that platform, and onto Outlook.com.
In December 2013, folks.
Bad Microsoft is truly a pitiful company.
On the bright side, it seems that the impending exit of Steve Ballmer has reawakened the creative and managerial juices at #1 Microsoft Way in Redmond.
Source/Related: Office.com Blog
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