"OK, people, listen up. Seymour, pay attention. Elsie, turn on your hearing aid. It's time to move your Hotmail accounts to Outlook.com. Hey! No, stop complaining. Don't use that language, Ethel, it's un-ladylike."
Yes, the the time has come - the hundreds of millions of email users who are currently using Hotmail will be migrated over to Outlook.com by this summer, Microsoft said Tuesday. For many of Microsoft's long-time customers, this will be their first experience with the Windows 8-styled "Metro" user interface that Microsoft is propagating around its properties.
"We've been very excited by the adoption of the preview and how it's delivering on our promise of a new, reimagined email service," David Law, director of product management for Outlook.com, said in a blog post on Tuesday. "Throughout the preview, we learned a tremendous amount from seeing how people used the service. Early adopters have told us what they liked, what they'd like to see next, and what we needed to do to make more people switch. And we've used that to add new features and fine-tune the services to scale. Now that Outlook.com is coming out of preview, we'll be kicking off a huge push across a number of countries around the world to drive even greater awareness and adoption of Outlook.com."
