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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Tuesday, March 14, 2006

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1,000,000

Today Windows Live Mail surpassed the 1 million user mark.

We’ve been working on this product now for a little over a year and I can’t begin to explain how incredibly proud and happy I am with the folks who helped get us here… especially the 1 million users that helped shape the work of the past milestones as well as the work we plan to do the rest of this year.

Scaling a service is hard… especially one that’s only a year old :-). next stop 10 million.

PS – if this kind of stuff excites you, we have a ton of open positions.

Windows Live
Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2006    Permalink    Comments [8]  View blog reactions

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Wednesday, March 15, 2006 12:32:36 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Well if you'd like another tester I'd be happy to be one. However the only "invite" to live mail I received had a non-clickable "signup" button. It's a bit difficult to test a product if it's impossible to sign up!
RichB
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 8:58:24 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Yeah, but all those positions are based in Mountain View. ;-)
tod
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 10:39:24 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Or in China (Shanghai), if you'd like.
anonymous
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 12:51:06 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Does anyone have any idea how many user Gmail has? I've always wondered this.

Congrats on hitting that 1 million mark. Seems like only yesterday I was reading about how the beta had been expanded to 200k users. How times flies.
Samuel
Saturday, March 18, 2006 12:14:47 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
So functionality is measured in numbers now? If so then bonzo buddy should be one kick ass application out there =)

With hundreds of millions of hotmail users..1 million (globally) is not such a great feat.

How I wish users would have been given the option to flag themselves off the beta team. I find Live mail beta to be slow and ineffective. What good are all the "outlook" like features when the interface is that slow and a tad bit confusing to the average mom and pa out there. In the age of gmail (Fast, easy, UBER EFFECTIVE), live mail (beta or non) seems to have lost the race
Adeel Khan
Sunday, March 19, 2006 2:41:21 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Well you know that you can either decline switching over to the beta or even if you have joined, you can opt-out at any time. To do this just go to options, and it is the last thing on the list.

As for the speed, I don't find it all that slow. There is an initial load-up time but gmail also has this as well. I'm running on a 4 year old computer and it seems to run fine. I would say the only sluggishness I percieve is when I'm dragging and droping e-mails. There is a slight delay there.

Finally regarding usability, I will say that I do find gmail easier to use and the layout makes a bit more sense. This is probably my greatest area of concern as the few people I have shown this beta to have commented that it looks "cluttered" which I personally attribute to the 2 banner ads. If those were replaced with a single skyscraper containing text ads (ala adSense or adCenter) that would greatly improve it. For fun I made a mockup of what it would look like and it really does clear things up quite a bit.
Samuel
Monday, March 20, 2006 10:17:56 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
hi by any chance if you have a spare live mail invite, can you please mailto:7736237@gmail.com..i'm hanging to get off the gmail train
spencer
Wednesday, March 22, 2006 1:25:47 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Omar,

I have loved using the Live Mail beta. Quite honestly, though, I am disappointed that the Firefox experience will be the "Hotmail Classic" view. I just don't understand why Firefox support for the full experience cannot be included. I'm an ASP.NET dev and everything I do when developing my products makes sure cross-browser support is consistent.

I know it can be done. We can see it with Yahoo! Mail beta and Gmail. I would love to hear your point of view on this posted somewhere (maybe here). Really and truly...although I know that may not be possible :)

Anyway, thanks for the great work and interesting blog.

John
John Walker
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