Hotmail Takes a Dirt Nap
Hotmail, the Web-based email service Microsoft acquired in 1997 for $500 million — its largest acquisition at the time — is no more. Microsoft said Thursday that it has finished its Hotmail to Outlook.com transition, a massive undertaking that required migrating hundreds of millions of Hotmail accounts and some 150 petabytes of email data to Outlook.com, its much-improved “modern” email service. With that hard work finished, the number of active Outlook.com accounts has surpassed 400 million, and Hotmail — one of the very first services to offer free Web-based email — is gone, though user Hotmail addresses live on, if their owners so choose.