Hotmail Mobile Usage Spikes Thanks To Apple iOS 5

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft is proud to announce that mobile usage of its Hotmail service has exploded in the past few weeks, and guess who is to thank? Apple! More than 2 million Apple users linked their Hotmail accounts to their iPhones and iPads since the launch of iOS 5."

Re:If you are wondering why

[agentgonzo]

That aside, there are still plenty of people who use iPhones who aren't that technologically literate. They won't know what server to connect to or what an exchange account is. All they know is that they have an iPhone and a Hotmail account. If there's an option in the mail app to configure an Exchange account, they won't bother. If there is one to configure a Hotmail account they'll go "Oooh, I can get my hotmail on my phone" and do it.

Re:Doesn't explain why.

[gmack]

Email addresses are hard to change. I know a lot of people who still have their email address from 10 years ago and don't want to touch it because that's the email address everyone has and tracking down everyone on the old address would be far too hard.

I can understand the sentiment because I've had my email address for 14 years now and every once and awhile I get someone I haven't heard from in a few years get in contact with me using the address I gave them years ago.

Normal with the new Google policy for gmail ....

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to make a new gmail account... you know what? They ask my phone number to "identify" who I am and where I lived.

Google stomach is so greedy that they don't get enough with your own email search terms to make target advertising... now they want to OWN your own personal information.

That new policy is annoying enough to make a lot of people moving to hotmail again. So yeah... perhaps mobile is one cause for the hotmail surge... but I guess the other hidden one, is new gmail identify policy.

Re:Apple is losing it's hold

[oudzeeman]

$150 million, not $5 billion. Microsoft bought 150 million dollars worth of non-voting shares as part of a patent licensing agreement, and also agreed to produce MS Office for OS X for at least 5 years (this was the important part, since many big software vendors had not yet committed to port their code to the new OS), and Internet explorer would be bundled as the default browser for 5 years (I think it was 5 years).

Apple was a multi-billion dollar company with 1.2 billion in cash at the time. It was in trouble financially, but it probably could have survived without that $150 million.