I thought it was an apples and oranges comparison until I saw the “Outlook Webmail” bit. Does make it confusing for us MS Office types who use Outlook as a client only.

cheers, Paul

Microsoft has not publicly said why they chose Outlook.com but it is not too difficult to make a reasonable guess. When most people think of Microsoft & email they think of Outlook. To most, Outlook has a good reputation. So, it is logical that they would want to capitalize on the name.

IMO, if over time the web interface continues to evolve to look more like the desktop Outlook then they made the correct decision.
Outlook.com is simple, straight forward and clean.

Joe

Microsoft’s creation of outlook.com is acknowledgement that locally installed email clients will soon be a thing of the past. Web based email clients are so much better that there is no longer any reason to use locally installed email clients. Gmail is light years ahead of Outlook and Microsoft knows it. We have migrated hundreds of thousands of email messages for Customers as they migrate from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps for Business. Most of them have employees who are so uncomfortable with change that they continue using Outlook as their local email client after the migration, even though this is completely unnecessary and costs the business money.

That depends on the point of view. Maybe they are better for you, but many users will want something else. Personally I completely dislike gmail and would never use it as my email client.

Microsoft’s creation of outlook.com is acknowledgement that locally installed email clients will soon be a thing of the past. Web based email clients are so much better that there is no longer any reason to use locally installed email clients. Gmail is light years ahead of Outlook and Microsoft knows it. We have migrated hundreds of thousands of email messages for Customers as they migrate from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps for Business. Most of them have employees who are so uncomfortable with change that they continue using Outlook as their local email client after the migration, even though this is completely unnecessary and costs the business money.

Doug, I completely disagree with such sweeping statements. To begin with, Microsoft is NOT the only provider of email clients. No matter what they do, business and individuals will always have a choice for their email. They’ve been trying to move everything to the web for years on end, and many (most) of their customers have not been happy. They may be willing to use one or two things on the web but not everything.

And more and more I am beginning to think that a lot of customers are digging in their heels and switching over to Mac because Microsoft is being such a jerk and acting like such a bully. After all, a lot of people now own Apple products. So Apple is no longer a foreign territory for Microsoft users. So that makes a switch much more attractive if Microsoft does something that, for these people, is the absolute final straw of anger, frustration and aggravation for them.

But personally, I do not find that web based mail is fast or convenient. And I have addresses with gmail, yahoo mail, earthlink mail and comcast mail plus an imap account with Apple’s me.com — on the *web.* Each has its own features, and gmail is pretty good but for efficiency would *never* be my first choice. Any webmail for me would be a far distant LAST choice, both for business and personal email. And, fyi, I have more than 13 gigabytes of email on my own computer (I just deleted a few GB of mail the other day after saving the folders to an external drive).

On the other hand, one way to do both is to have a gmail address, set gmail to save all mail on its server (and pay for more space if you use up their very generous allotment) and have your local email client pull in gmail and store it on your computer or servers locally. That gives you a back up on the web plus local efficiency. (I do this for some mail).

Time is money and if a business is a heavy user of email then they need something local at their own place of business, in MY opinion. I think keeping control of your own stuff is valuable, and sending the whole shebang to somebody else’s servers and keeping it there *instead of* at your own place is a concern.

If a consultant or my hired IT freelance person waltzed in the door and told me to move all my mail to the web and started trying to sell me on the idea, he’d soon be waltzing back out the door.

Doug, it almost sounds as though you are working for Google or Gmail or some such. Many of us are perfectly happy with our PC based mail clients. I have both Hotmail and Gmail as well as a couple of other emails, and have all set up to be checked in my WLM 2012 on my PC. Works great. Now I don’t have to learn 3 or 4 different web based mails, just one mail client. Simple!

I’d have to agree Ted either that or just stirring some #$%@#$ up.
I use Outlook 2007 and have both my .msn, and .live accounts coming into it, instead of WLM, and love it. Have no problems either.
Everyone has their own opinions though