The company Hotmail was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith and represented one of the first free webmail services on the network. It was commercially released on July 4, 1996, coinciding with the U.S. Independence Day homeland date and as a kind of “ISP mail freedom” symbol. The name was chosen from many possibilities that ended in mail, and the initial acronym Hot, contained the letters HTML, the language commonly used for the realization of web pages. And in a pun there was the name.
The initial storage limit was 2MB. In 1997 the company reported more than 8.50 million subscribers and was sold in December of the same year to Microsoft for $400 million, which was joined by the instant messaging service MSN which was renamed MSN Hotmail. Becoming the most popular e-messaging service in the world and used by more than 36 countries with their different languages.
For 16 years it ruled the market widely, until Gmail stole the throne in 2012.In 2004 Google announced its own messaging service that would shade Microsoft, it was called Gmail, who offered more storage and was more intuitive and fast. Over time google managed to greatly improve the service offered by Hotmail. And by 2011 Hotmail was already a problem for Microsoft that for 2012 represented the year when Hotmail said goodbye, the way we knew it. Google surpassed it by 400 thousand users worldwide. And Microsoft decided that Hotmail would be integrated into the new online email platform called Outlook. Transition that was completed in 2013. and remains in effect to date. But today we want to remember that noble company that made us learn to connect and chat there in the 90s.
