Ashish’s World!

I had written a post about my Hotmail woes a few days back but continue to use the service, though I am relying more and more on my company email account now. What makes me write this post today is an email in my Inbox from Hotmail Staff with the title “Connect to Friends with Hotmail”. Being a social networking fan, I was immediately drawn to this email and clicked open to read it (I seldom read any emails from Hotmail Staff, otherwise).

What a disappointment - they don’t get anything to talk about other than “How to create a soundtrack for your life with MSN Messenger”, “Win a chance to be a rock star” or “Fox Fantasy Football Powered by MSN”!! I mean - I don’t understand how can I “connect” with my friends using these links. I will hardly even click on those links and read the details - I am annoyed because the content of the email has no relationship with the subject of the email. I feel cheated.

Instead, what I was expecting was an innovative way of using that data. I can’t believe that the Hotmail team can’t think of more innovative ways of using the data that they have. Come on - you have knowledge about all the people I write to most frequently, about people who write to me more often than I write to them, about the normal time lag before I compose a reply - and I also know that you are a bunch of smart people working there in the Bay Area. I will not believe if you tell me that you don’t know that there are a lot of applications that can be created making use of that data and still respecting the ‘terms of privacy agreements’. But, if you can’t - you can at least take a bit of inspiration from GMail, who IMHO can still do a much better job. If you still can’t, partner with Tekriti and we will show you how to improve Hotmail. Anybody listening?

But, has Hotmail really lost it?

I try not to sound negative about these email providers - mainly because I think almost all the providers suck - but Hotmail troubles me more because of the fact that this is supported by a company that I really admire and, still, think is one of the best companies to work for. And the second reason is that the success story of Hotmail is the one which had made me explore my entrepreneurial capabilities years back when I was still at school (more on that some other day!). One person that I haven’t met and would really like to meet is Sabeer Bhatia. I hope to catch up with him some day, not in the too distant future.