Yesterday when MSN relaunched its flagship web-based email brand of Hotmail, I was reminded of the earlier days of Internet era. Hotmail was created in 1996 and taken over by Microsoft in 1998. When I accessed the internet first time, the vey first website I opened was Hotmail and I loved the brand as it was the only one where I could get my free email address. I got my first email id at hotmail in 1998 and was very content with its features. But over time, I started facing many problems like its slow & inaccessible servers, frequent down times, meagre storage space of only 2 MB (free) and compulsory login condition for once every month to sustain that account were some of the features which compelled me to look for other options. I migrated to Yahoo Mail and later on to Google Mail after its launch in 2004. Since this 7th February, Gmail has officially launched the product after continuing with its beta version for almost three years. I am highly impressed with its 2.8GB storage space and a hell of other features. All these will make it difficult for me to migrate back to hotmail. But hotmail on its part is also introducing very interesting features like 2GB storage, integration with Live messenger, reading pane etc. to name a few. Despite all these, it wil have to introduce more features and some uniques too to entice the existing users like me. If all these it had done earlier itself, users like me would have never migrated. But still its not too late. Hotmail boasts of 2.8 million active users today too (including me who is there just to keep my first account live and no other use!) and being the pioneer Hotmail still is a very strong brand. But because of neglect for all these while, it is fighting a lost battle and needs to make up a lot.

The decision to revive the Hotmail brand came just days after MSN bid to take over Yahoo!. Perhaps its better to revive your own portfolio of strong brands. Just purchasing brands is not enough, managing them well is more important. When the news of MSN’s intention to purchase Yahoo flashed once again this year, someone joked that if this deal really goes through, Yahoo will become as dead as Hotmail!…and MSN has atleast got this message right, when it decided to better manage its exisiting brands.