Gadgetory

so one of the biggest pieces of news this week Microsoft relaunched hotmail is outlook com hotmail still exist they're going to transition everybody into outlook wild new interface looks like Metro basically it's a full-screen web metro app and as it happens brian hall who is the program manager if GM of windows is on the phone with us so we're just going to cut to brian c is it this button it's got a checkbox I think you're good that button hello Ryan Hall I yeah hi this was brian hall hey man it's this is nilay patel on the verge cast north ross miller in a live audience of thousands of people and we're just talking about starcraft i'm here for you what do you know what league are you in what's your building oh my god okay that's about all I know yeah so hey let's talk about outlook in hotmail uh what'd you do why'd you do it why did you have it described released this week we released a new email service outlook.com it's a it's a new service is really focused on supporting the cloud of apps and devices people use for email and connecting with the other services that people use like Facebook and Twitter and we did this we've had we've had hotmail for an operator hotmail for about 16 years we obviously have exchanged and outlook and the people use at work and we we just decided it was time to do something new and to bring the best from each of those put them together and and release it right in time for the new wave of products that we could have coming out with windows 8 with the new version of office with the new windows phone and a new xbox so i have a lot of questions about the interface and what you've how you're doing the service on the back end to serve all these devices but the my first question is very simply the name why why not reboot hotmail which is you know a huge brand has millions of users right the most popular email service what mean are you're killing hot me is gone for good after this ad you more or less you'll be anyone will be able to keep using their @ hotmail.com email address but we will be over time upgrading all hotmail users to outlook and and the hotmail web interface that you that you know Anna probably use for years and years will go away at that point so you can the main reason to go ahead sorry so if you have a hotmail com that'll just always work you're not can you say well upgrade all users to outlook that to me sounds like Oh upgrade them all to match that looked up because the UI right yeah that's we're asking just the UI yet more the more the UI in the back-end infrastructure that we're using because today for instance if i go to mail.com sign in using my app hotmail.com email address i can go up to options and say upgrade to outlook yeah and when i do that i get all of the new functions of about look calm it's just that the email but i'm sending from a receiving to is my mail dot com address and so in my case for instance you could choose to just keep using your email address on ad infinitum but in my case I chose to also get a nap outlook.com address and now I'll still receive any email that goes to my hotmail account but it goes off into a folder and and when I reply I can choose to reply from my at outlook or my aunt Mel but I'll clearly more likely use at outlook and so for people that have used hotmail for a while they're not going to lose anything all they get is a must much better experience more forward-looking experience for doing email using the same account same contacts name say nails that they've had for a while right so let's talk about this experience you're building in skype you're building in what is a really very streamlined kind of Metro design have you made any like big changes for the web as opposed because you know we've experienced Metro on devices thus far right on the phone yeah on the on obviously with windows 8 it's coming you have it a little bit on xbox but it's never really been native on the web in this way have you made any like big changes to adapt to that or no um yes and no I mean certainly the biggest changes that we made were deciding to remove the things that people didn't use most of the time and that you know probably sounds kind of obvious but just go look at the other email services throughout their is that you'll see that it's not that obvious or for that matter and so I think that was one of the biggest decisions that we had to make we also had to had to decide to go all the way and figure out what was the right application of the design principles from Windows 8 or Windows Phone for the web and I think you'll see one version of it with with outlook that looks great and is clearly designed for email but you'll see another one that that as we in the next month upgrade the SkyDrive experience you know that one's much more of a picture first give people snapshots of what documents they have that kind of thing and it looks beautiful but but it's a you know still still the same design principles so there have been a lot of tweaks on the email formula bringing in rosters mute switch me value such there were a lot of tweaks and pulling in social and you know integrating more services and chat you know for instance gchat is in gmail a lot of people use it through that are there ways you're rethinking actual straightforward email or or plan to rethink it or can it be rethought I'm i think there's we have some i think some smart and pretty powerful tools but there's definitely a lot of runway emails a funny thing because for the most part email messages are email messages are email messages and you know they each get a place in your inbox or in your folder and it was was only until a couple years ago that we started to realize and and deliver features that treated different messages as you know trying to accomplish very different things for instance you look at the email that people receive today about fifty percent of it is commercial yes or at the newsletter or a daily deal or a shipping receipt and or a shipping update or anything like that each of those you kind of want to treat a little bit different me like annoying annulus groupon deals I do Ross all five fedex notifications it's very strange how does one forget how can you fix that me your addresses and i'll start I'll start getting you some more of those if you'd like oh good and uh into what what we found is you know for instance I I do a decent matter shopping on Amazon and I really want to see shipping updates I don't really care that about the receipt that they send me and I certainly don't want the email that comes it says do you want to review the seven product that you bought because if I want to review my review my don't need an email and so I'm able with with outlook.com to treat each of those differently and take the shipping receipts put them off into a folder where I want to store them uh so I can check them whereas the other things just automatically delete them or me keep the latest latest version or things like that similarly photos like photos is an area where we put put a bunch of work in because uh people send photos in different ways I get I you could send me a bunch of JPEGs you can send me a flicker link you can send me a skydrive album so we've been working on how do we make sure that we recognize every one of those as a photo mail and let you have a beautiful view of it without having to leave your inbox so I think there's one we think so that's I think what's really interesting to me there is that to me is what you do with the web UI the web version of Outlook right that's the that's the main interface here's all these exciting new features and here's all this stuff but I don't want any of that on the phone I don't even know if I want to believe that in a local client of a machine where I want to be focused on like blasting through an inbox right how are you are you going to change that for the phone interface is there going to be a native hotmail client are you going to build into the windows phone mail client and what's what's sort of the plan for all the other devices that come into the ecosystem yeah like a native windows 8 app yeah yeah with the with the windows 8 mail app with new versions of outlook on the desktop and with Windows Phone will keep pushing the envelope to make sure that outlook.com works beautifully between them and that some of the best features are surfaced in the in the built-in app are you gonna go to Laura are you going to go beyond like mail protocols I mean that's like what I'm asking is you can write all kinds of mail clients and they run on imap or maybe they run an exchange but but what you're doing with Outlook sounds like at least in the web client go a little bit deeper than here's a bunch of mail will filter it locally or we'll do some local operations once it comes through the pipe yeah are you gonna are they are the apps going to go deeper than just sinking over on map in exchange to outlook I think is really deeper integration and what kind of a standard yeah there's more that we can do there uh we just released outlook for the first time this week and so I'm not going to go into more the things that we're thinking about but we certainly think we look I'm just exciting will I be emailing over pop3 with my xbox oh my god you'll be apparently going through your friends group on okay I'm curious for you are you getting things done guy what's your actual personal approach to email i am a i am win a against an email no I'm a Pilar now I'm I'm someone who I leaves things in my inbox uh who I I'm pretty Zen about I am always kind of on top of things and if I see something that I need to do LG TD that thing but I don't worry about filing things off in the folders or anything like that and it turns out that most emailers are Tyler's yeah which is probably why we built so many tools to just keep automatically cleaning up your inbox for you one of the features that I've actually liked the most and in outlook is the way that I can flag things because when I flag something it just pops to the top of my inbox and I have a rule set that anytime I email myself either from my work account or from my personal account it automatically flags into that in the Barbara for the things that I'm worried I might forget about that's the way that I stay on top of it it is their point you mentioned sort of reconciling these different apps between the phone and the windows 8 and the web is there a point where those start to converge and be literally the same app in a running and silver lighter or html5 or something like that um I don't know they're sharing we're sharing more and more code between them but I think the thing that you also have to remember is most of the people today that use use email on their phone or their using the native mail client and so you know the vast majority people that use mail on iphone or using mail hmm and so what we've done is we've made it so that through exchange activesync you can get all of your stuff there but also all of these power features i was talking about are partly there to keep stuff out of your inbox so they're just the things that you want your inbox are there and you can quickly triage through your mail the stuff that actually matters on your phone on is well I know your kind of short on time so I just want to rat I mean I think my biggest question yet oh you got time you can stay on the whole time yeah an hour about the whole time rollin uh well you know my question is we're talking about all these features we add to mail and like new interfaces and just to me comes back his email but the right solution right ultimately like when I my parents interact with email like I'd fear for them because there is so much crap in their inbox and that's the that's like the primary attack vector for people right now look you know you send an email click this link and like you automatically have fished off into the world um is that this is the right solution is a more real-time solution like Paul saying the more of a chat integration you've got skype is this the right thing will wave is open-source yeah yeah you can takes another step it's rest google but you know i mean like it oh yeah yeah yeah we're like yeah my brother-in-law is 20 he never he doesn't use email it doesn't have any mail address he just uses like Facebook messaging know is that is that yeah living in the past were living in the future I don't I don't know yeah it's just man about let's ask with us Brian what if it being I think I think I think that um everybody people are gonna use multiple tools there's no question about that and for certain people like when I want to get in touch with my younger brother I text him and doing anything other than text him texting him would probably be kind of a dumb way you get in touch with my younger brother because I know how he communicates and so for certain people they'll do most of their things on on on Facebook or on Twitter or or the like but the thing is emailed is part of the solution because it fills the center needs of people have obviously some of it for communicating with other people like if I just want to share a set of photos with a limited set of people emails often the easiest way to do it or if I want to let people know an update about my kids birthday party it's pretty easy to do via email but also matters a lot for commercial mail and we may not love commercial mail but it but it plays an important role and so we're going to keep doing doing hard work in order to make me her that but that's on the smart way and you can say on top of it and all that kind of stuff but we definitely see more opportunity to blend them in the right way and that's why we have the facebook and twitter integration into in doubt look and that kind of thing and totally it'll be interesting to watch but let me ask you where does your where should your contact list live where's the canonical store for your contacts because I I want it to be local like I want to maintain but that's a very power user like i'm going to manage this list of contacts in that's not workable for most people i know a lot of people who just want it to be facebook because that's the friend list they're managing anyway but that doesn't work for work so that need kind of like maybe i'll use linkedin for work and you've got now you've got all these competing canonical contact stores how are you managing kind of that how are you telling me because email is I think the place where you do the most interaction with your contact list outside of like a phone dialer um our approach and point of view on this one is that almost everyone's going to have multiple contact lists and so the key isn't try and create one grand unification theory of contactless instead it's to make sure that they connect together in the right way so when you want to actually use your contacts you can do that and so for instance I have my print of personal work connections and LinkedIn I have my friends in facebook I have my official work contacts in I'm exchange and then I have uh the kind of closest friends information in my phone yeah uh and so what it which ends up being meaning really in my email because my the items that I save on my phone are going into my in my Outlook account and so our approaches to say let's figure out how to connect all of those together so that you have the stuff that you want when you want it and so for instance I have facebook and linkedin connected telecom and because of that I can access any of the contact information from those yet and they're nice because I don't have to keep updating things they just automatically sync whatever slate is mmm and until favoritings everybody say that again until facebook makes everybody's default email address at facebook.com/ that's ruining your contact list right i mean is it not the danger they fixed it though they did well they died I wish they did say V it's off they pushed a different less crappy button basically our Robert go then at that cat that instance maybe we you know more people will start putting their contacts in their email we can certainly do live contact an email and so you know there's a there's a pushin pushin poll I gotta say for Neal eyes question whoever owns my canonical list is whoever gives me the best you I to weed through it right and and and what's what sucks is that um my best UI is the dress book but every time accidentally or for whatever reason end up getting synced up with gmail yeah it gets totally destroyed and now my so the core list is in the worst interfere I don't know but I have a contact list anymore I just have a lot of services that compete there's like a the first entry in my list is something like ABC I don't even know we are you not done the TVC ocean just like a v8 your plumbing or sell your contact list is now like a phone book from the 40s yeah I synced with the yellow pages but aunty pony somehow um oh shoot I had it oh so you excuse my ignorance but but are you guys putting a fuse the other day and are you guys putting any features in outlook that are you know a business outlook style like meeting invitations or like you know calendar invites or uh something that happens to me all the time is somebody will send me an email and and and then they'll attempt to it yeah using outlook functionality that obviously is you mean they'll send the read that message real quickly signal yeah yeah yeah yeah so the the drunk and then I'll send them the I don't use outlook signal which is here I'll saying I'm sorry I read the email awesome LOLOL oh wait are those features you know you know I mean that's a frustrating thing for me i don't i never used facebook a lot and but i'd get invited to things all the time in facebook and and so I yeah sometimes I would notice them I'd RSVP but then you know that information never makes it onto my calendar that a you know that never makes it into my address book like where I'm supposed to go you know it's not connected to any map being serviced it's just stuck there and Facebook is that something you guys are working on yeah I'm some of the yes some of it we saw work to do like in the case of the Facebook example when i connect my facebook account with outlook all of the calendar entries on facebook show up in my outlook calendar and one of the one of the things that's important to remember is that outlook account that i use is also a Microsoft account which is moving forward what you use to sign into Windows 8 or Windows Phone or xbox or anything like that and so when I connect those that same calendar that same contact list is also showing up in the capital people and calendar app on Windows 8 or in the calendar on in Outlook and so when I'm at work I have one calendar that is overlapping all my work stuff as well as my personal stuff whether I put them in there or my wife put them into our shared calendar or they came from facebook and I think we're doing a pretty good job of pushing forward on making the scenario of I want to invite someone to something and and they actually get it accept it and it's on their phone or wherever they keep the primary calendar I think there are some things that we can keep pushing the envelope on that exchange and and outlook do really well and we'll just keep looking at what do people like the most with the new outlook desktop app what do they like the most with the new outlook.com and you know pick the best features and implement Amann dough but so actually that I think that's kind of my biggest question is you have an exchange desktop app you have an Outlook desktop app I'm assuming you have an Outlook desktop app for metro in Windows 8 and now even a metro style web app with which one is the right one I mean which one which one is the one that people are supposed to use it is is the right question um I think it depends on on where you're where you are what you're using and what you're doing and so in my case for instance I have a Windows 8 desktop a Windows 8 laptop and the windows 8 tablet do you think when I'm Simon is completely back yeah yeah and if in the case of I have it I haven't decided to avoid the interwebs this year yeah I'm working hard on my desktop on my desktop I use outlook you're both my personal email in for my work email and i love it on my tablet i use the built in windows 8 mail app hmm because it works so great on touches not that outlook.com doesn't work well on touch but this thing is just built for the windows 8 environment i love that and then and that one has both my exchange my work email I microsoft.com address as well as my at outlook.com email going into it and then on my laptop I tend to use outlook for my work and outlook.com outlook yeah alikom for my personal just because I'm used to doing webmail on that machine and so I think it'll kind of be common then people are just picking what's the best tool for the different device that we're using yeah and we're not trying to say that there's one that's best in all cases is it just wouldn't be true yeah I mean I only really use web interfaces for mail when I'm away from my computer because to me you know email such a primary thing that I do with a pc that I want I always want the native experience so if I'm sitting my desktop and I'm opening gmail.com in a browser I'm like why didn't I open a mail app or actually know what I do i do you sparrow do you use what's the lowest unveiled I don't you what's also multi Loggins but the web interface uh fluid you use that I do yeah so that's a that's a web interface it is so Brian here's what here's what I do and tell me if this sounds crazy or if this is possible or smart with the outlook web app on OS 10 I use gmail we used google apps for business google apps for for cash money and i run fluid on my mac which is you know it breaks out browsers into their own instances so I basically have one instance open of WebKit for my work gmail one for my personal gmail one for my my spam gmail that I just used to email Ross um is that something I mean is that something you're gonna want like Outlook users to do or are you going to say well we built a native app why don't you just use the native app um because to me that that's actually a really common gmail use case that I see everybody at the verge except for Paul doesn't use the internet breaks out gmail into a nap because we use Google Apps for Business yeah but you've kind of have to do that because you had the hack around the fact that otherwise you'd have to sign in sign out sign in/sign out yes right now then go from your work to home and so you're not you're not solving some you know or email problem by doing that you're just hacking around how gmail works yes is the IR blasters of email i have you ever considered using one of microsoft's 5ml products and will now I mean I think Ryan agree in our case go ahead in our case our approaches you use different accounts for working for home yeah and you can either pull them like I have my work account in my home account I'm going in doubt look for me or if I wanted if I like the web interface is better I could be signed in the mode office 365 using at microsoft com as well as uh signed in to outlook.com and I don't have to use something like blue in order to create different WebKit instances or whatever right I can just be in there in whatever browser I have and some people do that amazing to me sometimes now how many people only want to use webmail yeah that feels a little uh to be a sensible backward-looking but I also like webmail so I can get that yeah the other half that people have to do sometimes around gmail is there's a native apps for a for a given mail service or not uh not good bad or anything like that but people always think oh you need the you need a outlook.com app on iOS and part of that is condition because of the way Google does priority inbox and stars it doesn't work with any other mail client and so if you don't have a native google app your gmail app you're getting a weird gmail experience whereas for us we've worked hard in order to make sure that we keep the crap out of your inbox that you don't want as well as use things like flags and it will auto create tasks so that you don't have to have a separate app for the way that you'd expect alright last question what's the next move for outlook and what's your favorite thing about gmail don't listen to Pope Paul polishes he doesn't get to troll people in real life no my favorite thing about gmail is how easy it is to forward into my Outlook account Oh smooth Brian hall is smooth oh the for outlook.com are one we're getting a bunch of feedback and so you'll see a post from us shortly but here's a bunch stuff that we've heard here's what we're going to do about it or here's here's the what the real deal is and so the feedback super helpful we look look forward to getting more of that and we definitely have some fit and finish and clean up and finish the design work on the work in a release as I mentioned new version of SkyDrive out this month it looks beautiful we have to do the calendar the calendar calendar can feel pretty retro when you click over to that I recommend doing it only once or twice and then mod at Penn I and then we're very excited to get skype yet rated him right and so those are the those are the main things in front of us but we're gonna learn more great well it's really exciting it's it's I will say seeing a company like Microsoft with this going through a huge range of changes abandon a brand like hotmail and say we're starting over starting fresh I mean hobby has a lot of baggage and to say we're starting over new interface new brand new ideas what email is is very exciting I don't know that you'll pull me away from gmail just yet I mean there's I guys have a gmail addiction problem yeah but I'm you know I've register oh I have one actually have a real last question why did you not register Ballmer and do not reply to outlook.com what happened there you're like let's see what they'll it's not the morons do why that do not reply might have been an oversight hahaha he but the good news is nobody will reply on the others you know it's someplace just have to decide that it's not worth trying to outsmart the interwebs and so you just kind of let let let things roll yeah but all I didn't want like did you did you did you pick up Brian hall and outlook.com before I went live I thought you did not well I have I have his banana yeah vice about yeah I didn't I didn't go pick a whole bunch of a whole bunch of different uh different variations or anything like that cuz I got an email address that i wanted it will work great yeah but nobody was ever like Steve what's demo that let's demo they're not look for you by creating an account but never a just wild have you seen bomb Iran balma is that I bet that's you there you yourself I have jet I have seen it yeah um one again once again never never tried out out with the interwebs the uh what I will say partly nope less than a hundred people probably inside the company yeah knew what we're doing a branding perspective okay and so there wasn't even a like internal company only go reserve your names kind of a thing back where we released it when we released it it was um game on yeah I mean it was crazy I mean literally our office tried to register everything oh yeah I've seen Steve Wozniak it undo I down hahaha Fat realizing i did I I'm glad we can fit name yeah well don't worry i will troll you from an endless array of Outlook addresses from now on time Brian it's a really great having you on man um come back you come back to us maybe in a year all the way back on the internet he'll let you know what he thinks about outlook to I looking forward to that all right yeah see you man it's like