(CNN) -- When Microsoft introduced a
preview version of a fresh and
inventive webmail service it called
Outlook.com last August, it was pretty
clear that it was telling the world that it
intended to start winding down its
venerable Hotmail sooner or later.
Now it's official.

The company is announcing that
Outlook.com is coming out of preview
mode and is now officially available
worldwide. And so it's going to start
moving more than 300 million
Hotmail users over. They'll be able to
keep their Hotmail.com e-mail
addresses — or Live.com or MSN.com,
if that's what they've got — but the
Hotmail service and brand will be
going away.

The transition will be gradual: At first,
the Hotmail faithful will get e-mails
and other alerts telling them about
the switchover. They'll be able to
make the jump immediately, or
postpone it. But by the end of the
summer, the company intends to
have moved all Hotmail users over to
Outlook.com.

For most of those people, that should
be a good thing — or at least, as
forced transitions go, not a bad thing.
While it's impossible to underestimate
the ferocity with which some folks
prefer to clutch onto whatever they've
already got, Outlook.com is a far
better service than Hotmail, with a
radically decluttered interface and
useful new organization tools. (I also
like its interface — which is a variant
of the Windows 8 look formerly
known as Metro — better than
Gmail's.)

Yet it's also recognizable as having a
family connection to Hotmail, reducing
the chances that anyone will be
bewildered by it or will lose a favorite
feature once the switchover is
complete.

At the moment, Microsoft says,
Outlook.com has 60 million active
members, a third of which are Gmail
users. (Presumably some of those are
true defectors from Gmail, while
others use both Gmail and
Outlook.com.) Once the Hotmail
transition is complete, Outlook.com
will have hundreds of millions of
users, giving it the same sort of
massive scale as Gmail (425 million
users as of June 2012) and Yahoo Mail
(281 million users as of December
2012).

And Microsoft seems to be serious
about winning over lots more users
from Gmail and other services: It's
planning to advertise Outlook.com
heavily in all sorts of media. The
company has posted a couple of
splashy TV spots — both of which,
unlike the current Scroogled
campaign , are devoted to making
people feel good about Outlook.com
rather than bad about Gmail.

www.cnn.com/2013/02/19/tech/web/microsoft-outlook-hotmail/index.html?hpt=hp_t2