First of all I have not sent a e-mail to anyone on Hotmail in a very long time. I am sure there are a lot of people that use it, but e-mail was always going missing and I personally find the interface horrible. Seems the Inventor of Hotmail did not like his interface very much either, as he has invested 5 million of his own dollars to build a toolbar that simply downloads the e-mail from Hotmail when the machine is idle.
I am not sure about you, but I receive and respond to e-mail today almost as fast as come in, sometime e-mail can be like a instant message conversations. From the point of view functionality I think the tool bar is pretty stupid. The second function piece adds some blogging tools, or actually it’s more a site annotation tool. What looks like has happened here is that the developer figured out part way into development is that he had a looser and had to add some functions to it in order for people to get excited about it.
What blows me away is he has had 50 programmers working on this thing. I tell you what give me 50 programmers 90 days and 5 million dollars and I will create a family of services that will cause people to sit up and notice.