Microsoft
has decided to hold on to the Hotmail brand for its online email
service.
The software developer originally was planning to retire the brand
and replace it with Windows Live Mail. The mail service now will be
called Windows Live Hotmail, Richard Sim, a senior product manager
with Microsoft disclosed on a
company blog.
The new brand will show up in the public version of the mail beta
in the coming weeks.
"We [
] found that many users were extremely loyal to the Hotmail
brand and perceived the beta as an upgrade to Hotmail. In fact, our
most loyal users have been very happy with Hotmail for years and
while they loved the improvements in the beta, some were a bit
confused by name change," Sim explained the reasoning behind the
name change.
Windows Live Hotmail is Microsoft's next generation online email
service. Based on Asynchronous Javascript and XML (Ajax)
technology, it aims to deliver an email application that behaves in
a similar fashion to a desktop email client.