Musings – Abhay S. Kushwaha

I just ran into two reports on BetaNews about Hotmail.

The first reports that in the first moves towards competing in the email business, they have enabled Anti-Virus scanning. Now existing users might remember that they already had a tie-up with McAfee but they have apparently expanded from scanning attachments being downloaded to scanning entire incoming and outgoing mails.

The second second reports that Microsoft will increase their storage. We know that already. But the interesting part is a quote from Blake Irving, corporate vice president of MSN’s Communication Services.

We are going to respond in a big way and will eliminate email storage as an issue for our users.

Wasn’t that Yahoo!’s war cry? Hmm… Either way, the fact that they took so long and called it ‘wait and see’ could also be a reason that they just saw more revenue drop issues and didn’t know quite what to do. I wonder if they thought of closing down Hotmail altogether… nah! Let’s see how things pan out. From the sound of it, Hotmail will probably offer more than 250Mb reported by ZDNET a few days ago.