14 DAY TRIAL // Redesign is always an integral part of building a new generation of products for Microsoft. And while for some offerings the revamping stops at the graphical user interface, for others it also impacts the logo and associated brand identity. The Windows Live Hotmail overhaul, as the service evolves to Wave 4, is likely to bring with it a new logo. A new video detailing the changes that Hotmail has gone through, and offering an insight into the resources and effort necessary to run the service, also unveiled a new logo, included in the image on the left. (Istartedsomething spotted this first)
However, despite being featured extensively in the video in question, the logo is yet to be sported by the official sign in the page of Windows Live Hotmail. This, despite the fact that the page in question did suffer in the recent past a small overhaul, reminiscent of the Metro graphical user interface that Microsoft was using for Windows Mobile.
There are no official details from Microsoft on the new Windows Live Hotmail logo, other than the inclusion in the video, which you will be able to find embedded at the bottom of this article. Hotmail was launched 15 years ago, and has since grown to serve over 360 million customers. According to Phil Smoot, partner development manager, Windows Live Hotmail, there are in excess of eight billion messages processed per day, 5.5 billion of which are Spam.
“Today it delivers a service that is localized to 59 markets, encompassing well over a billion inboxes that generate over two petabytes (2 million gigabytes) of new storage each month, and stores hundreds of petabytes in total. You’ll also see that through the years Hotmail’s back-end architecture has been upgraded and reworked multiple times to allow for this rapid growth and to incorporate advances in hardware. Given the operational challenges and trade-offs required to run a service of this size, developing and managing our systems at scale is second nature to the Hotmail team,” Smoot added.