Microsoft's Outlook.com Email Product Takes On Google Gmail

Google's Gmail service is getting hot new competition from Microsoft's revamped email offering.

Microsoft's newly revamped Outlook.com free email service is now available to all users, some seven months after it was introduced in a limited preview mode to replace Hotmail, Microsoft's longtime email offering. With the new and refreshed Outlook.com service and its updated and friendlier user features, Microsoft hopes to continue to lure users over from Gmail and other services.

In the last six months alone, 60 million people have signed up to use new Outlook.com email accounts, according to a Feb. 18 post on the Outlook Blog by David Law, director of product management for Outlook.com. "Last summer, we released a preview of Outlook.com, a new modern email service from Microsoft," wrote Law. "Since then, we've been humbled by the fast pace of adoption with over 60 million people already actively using Outlook.com. During the same period, we've received lots of feedback and made many improvements.


 Today, we're excited to announce the next step in this journey: Outlook.com is coming out of preview, and people everywhere can get started and give it a try at Outlook.com."  Microsoft will transition all Hotmail.com user accounts over to Outlook.com accounts by this summer, according to Law's post.