The initiative was wildly successful, as the service's user base grew faster than any media company in history. Microsoft wasted little time in leveraging its new asset, rolling Hotmail into its MSN group of services and localizing it for markets around the world. Hotmail ultimately agreed to sell to Microsoft in a stock-swap transaction reportedly valued as high as $400 million, minting a couple of early Internet millionaires in the process. America Online (AOL), the world's largest email provider at the time, had 12 million subscribers on file.īhatia told the Indian Express at the time that he was initially cautious of Microsoft due to its reputation as a monopolist, but said CEO Bill Gates had "not lost the ability to spot what's going on." The acquisition of Hotmail was validation of that vision, he added. The Microsoft Eraīy the time Microsoft struck up acquisition talks around late 1997, Hotmail reportedly had 10 million subscribers globally and controlled a quarter of the webmail market. Within the first 30 days, Hotmail had attracted over 100,000 subscribers and logged its first million in less than six months. Hotmail was an instant hit even with its 2MB storage limit, which is laughable by today's standards but it seemed pretty decent if not sufficient at the time. In retrospect, I can only imagine how many juvenile Hotmail addresses were created during this period. Those who signed up for an account were also free to come up with their own prefix, or the string of text before the symbol. The name was originally stylized as HoTMaiL in honor of HTML, the markup language used to make web pages.Īs one of the first webmail providers, Hotmail allowed users to access their inbox from anywhere in the world as long as they had an Internet connection. To put that timeline into perspective, Hotmail landed just one day after the movie Independence Day hit theaters. Hotmail launched shortly after on July 4, 1996, to symbolize freedom from ISP-based services. They scraped together $4,000 to build a prototype in 1995, which led to a $300,000 investment from venture capitalist Draper Fisher. The free email service was created by Stanford classmates Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia. The true elite would even have a GeoCities website, but that's another story for another day. At the time, there was no provider hotter than the aptly-named Hotmail. Savvy Internet users that wanted to go the extra mile would forego the standard email address that was issued by your ISP in favor of a custom address from a third-party provider.
All you really needed to impress the masses was a spiffy electronic mail address, or email addy for short. It wasn't all that difficult to be perceived as a technology bigwig in the mid-90s.
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