Web 2.0

Today is the day that the Windows Phone team has been driving towards, and we’re very excited to say that we’ve reached the biggest milestone for our internal team – the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Phone 7!  While the final integration of Windows Phone 7 with our partners’ hardware, software, and networks is underway, the work of our internal engineering team is largely complete. 

After taking a little time off to enjoy my birthday, I am pleased to bring back the next installment of the Windows Recession Sweepstakes.

We’ve done seven sweeps so far and I realized this weekend that I’ve never talked about Hotmail. Windows Live Hotmail recently got a refresh and it’s more powerful than ever at helping you save time and sweep away inbox clutter.

@DustynBryce.  Congratulations!  I will hit you up on Twitter to take care of the paperwork.

@DustynBryce.  Congratulations!  I will hit you up on Twitter to take care of the paperwork.

Congratulations nategoss, you’re our Windows Recessions Sweepstakes #5 winner.  Hit me up on Twitter with your email address.

Here at Hotmail, we’ve had quite a busy week! All of our customers are now upgraded. The majority of you got the new Hotmail just this past week, as we completed the rollout to over 350 million people in more than 220 countries around the world. Now, everyone can take advantage of a faster Hotmail experience with great new features like one-click filters, Sweep, Active Views and more.

Here at Hotmail, we’ve been busy getting our latest release out to our customers – upgrading server clusters, building the new indexes for conversation threading, and making tweaks to our site metrics and deployment software.

The Hotmail rollout continues to go along smoothly and we’re right on track with our release plan, having now upgraded nearly 50 million accounts on several different clusters. Of course, we continue to get comments from many of you who are eager to get access to the new Hotmail, and we’re just as eager to get the new version out to everyone.

There is a lot of excitement about the new Hotmail, and we are certainly eager to get the latest release into the hands of all our customers. Several of you have asked, “When will the new Hotmail come to my country?” As we mentioned in our earlier announcement, we don’t roll out by country (or by language, or anything else like that).

In just 5 days, over one million people downloaded the Windows Live Messenger app for iPhone that launched last week!  This early momentum is fantastic, and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve been getting from many of you.  We look forward to updating the iPhone app shortly to address a few issues that users have pointed out, and continuing to improve th