So on Tuesday I heard that hotmail.com was being replaced with outlook.com and innocently went to outlook.com to check it out…. it looks *very* basic, *very* simple, in a way it looks more like something from 10-20 years ago than a step forward…
Oh, and did I mention, if you click on outlook.com, it then changes your hotmail.com to the new format when you go back to it!
As you may be able to tell, I’m not altogether overwhelmed so far…
If I open a new email, I have to adjust the size of the internet browser to get it to show anything other than a white screen
And when I sent these images to a friend to blur them, it turns out the “attach” button doesn’t even work! I had to flip back over to hotmail just to do the attaching – this doesn’t feel overly tested yet!
And then there’s the little things, like yes the fonts bigger and clearer, but now I have to scroll down to see all my folders on the left, rather than seeing everything at a glance…
Let’s be honest though, which looks like the newer version of the two?!
(click on the images to see them properly)
hotmail.com
outlook.com
ineke.co.uk 
It frequently strikes me as curious how Microsoft, with all their money, expertise and experience so often fail over basic design issues. With software they will often fix it over a period of time, but with hardware there’s seldom any way to make it right. And they always want to paint themselves into a corner over operation.
Outlook.com looks great. I’m not sure how it fails tests of “basic design issues” as asserted by Toni.
Looks pretty much the same to me!