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The new email service from Microsoft will receive a name that combines the familiar Hotmail name with the heavily-backed Windows Live brand.

Ultimately we think faithful Hotmail users will continue to call the Windows Live branded service by the name they have known for over ten years. Long-time users who recall Hotmail's origins may remember the various obstacles Microsoft encountered in 1997 when they bought Hotmail and moved it from Solaris to Windows servers.

(Note: I know Wikipedia says Hotmail was on FreeBSD. My recollection was it ran on Solaris. Anyone who can definitively clarify this is invited to post in the comments below.)

Great times, those were, with people limited to a few MB of storage space, and spam was not running between 70 and 90 percent of the email on the Internet as it does today.

Richard Sim, senior product manager for Windows Live Hotmail, discussed how Windows Live Mail would receive a tweak, to make the more well-known name part of the service:

To do this, we started from scratch and built a whole new service from the ground up – and we called this Windows Live Mail. As we brought users onboard to this new service and had them kick the tires, we learned quickly that users loved it.

We knew we were onto a good thing. We also 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.

Gaining broad penetration with a brand name is no mean feat. Companies spend plenty to build brands, and more to maintain them. Tossing out Hotmail probably would have been one of those decisions where we would wonder what Windows Live topper Steve Berkowitz could have been thinking in doing so.

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