New Global Email Leader: Google Gmail Dethrones Microsoft Hotmail

By Rob Scott
November 8, 2012

After eight years of competition, Microsoft’s Hotmail has been knocked off the top spot as most-used email service by Google’s Gmail.
Hotmail launched in 1996 as one of the first Web-based email services and was purchased the following year by Microsoft for an estimated $400 million.
“Hotmail has been continually revised, upgraded and refined by Microsoft, with the company even going so far as to introduce an ‘all-new’ update a year ago that mimicked many of the features that won users over to Google,” reports Digital Trends.
However, the update was not enough for the service to maintain dominance, as Gmail took the lead last month worldwide.
“This isn’t the first time that this shift has been reported; Google quietly boasted about it happening way back in June of this year, in the middle of a blog post about cloud computing when it announced that it had ‘more than 425 million active users globally,'” indicates the post, pointing out that comScore disagreed with Google’s numbers at the time.
But now it is official, as confirmed by third-party metrics. Digital Trends notes that Microsoft introducing Outlook.com as its Hotmail replacement in July could be a factor.
American email service use is slightly different than the global stats. Yahoo has 40.8 percent of the U.S. market, compared with Gmail’s 36.7 percent and Hotmail’s 18.9 percent.

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