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Gerald asked: “Why did Microsoft screw up hotmail.com. They merged it into Outlook and mucked up the whole thing. hotmail was a simple and elegant program. Now I’m trying to access e-mails, trying to mail out stuff and it’s becoming impossible with the new Outlook. Why have they done that and has anybody bothered to tell Microsoft to go back to the simple elegant program they used to have?”
Gerald, Microsoft lost pretty much all Hotmail users to first Yahoo, and then Google, what they did not lose was the Outlook business users. Even a lot of Microsoft Office home users used to use Outlook.
They were probably looking to retain those people by making online Outlook look the same as desktop Outlook.
If you look at Windows 10’s Mail, it also has the same look and feel.
At this point, Microsoft is probably trying to provide a familiar experience to the majority of its users.
These changes have slowly been making their way across Microsoft’s entire product line, and for most people they’re what “normal” looks like these days.
Which brings us to the question of whether you’d prefer to use Gmail instead of Outlook.com, yourself? Here’s an article that gives you step-by-step instructions, with pictures, on how to add a hotmail.com address to your Gmail.
You will have to begin the process by creating a Google account, which will give you a gmail.com address whether you want one or not, but you can pretend that it doesn’t exist if you choose.