How Hotmail changed Microsoft (and email) forever

Enlarge / The many lives of Hotmail. (credit: Sean Gallagher) Twenty years ago this week—on December 29, 1997— Bill Gates bought Microsoft a $ 450 million late Christmas present: a Sunnyvale-based outfit called Hotmail. With the buy—the largest all-cash Internet startup purchase of its day—Microsoft plunged into the nascent world of Web-based email. Originally launched […]