 So one of the biggest pieces of news this week, Microsoft relaunched Hotmail as Outlook.com. Hotmail still exists, 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, GM of Windows, is on the phone with us. So we're just going to cut to Brian. Is it this button? It's got a checkbox. I think you're good. Hello, Brian Hall. Hi, this is Brian Hall. Hey man, this is Nilay Patel on the Vergecast, I'm with Ross Miller, Paul Miller, and a live audience of thousands of people. And we're just talking about StarCraft. I'm here for you. What do you want to know? What league are you in? What's your build? Oh my God. Okay, that's about all I know. So hey, let's talk about Outlook and Hotmail. What'd you do? Why'd you do it? Why did you commit this crime? This week we released a new email service, Outlook.com. It's a new service that's really focused on supporting the cloud of apps and devices that people use for email and connecting with the other services that people use like Facebook and Twitter. And we did this. We've had Hotmail for, an operated Hotmail for about 16 years. We obviously have Exchange and Outlook that people use at work, and we just decided it was time to do something new and to bring the best from each of those, put them together, and release it right in time for the new wave of products that we have coming out with Windows 8, with the new version of Office, with the new Windows phone, and the new Xbox. So I have a lot of questions about the interface and how you're doing the service on the backend to serve all these devices. But my first question is very simply the name. Why not reboot Hotmail, which is a huge brand, has millions of users, the most popular email service. I mean, you're killing Hotmail. Is Hotmail gone for good after this? More or less. Anyone will be able to keep using their athotmail.com email address. But we will be, over time, upgrading all Hotmail users to Outlook, and the Hotmail web interface that you know and have probably used for years and years will go away at that point. The main reason that... Go ahead, sorry. So if you have a hotmail.com, that'll just always work? When you say we'll upgrade all users to Outlook, that to me sounds like we'll upgrade them all to athotlook.com. It's the UI, right? Yeah, that's what we're asking. Just the UI? Yeah, more the UI and the backend infrastructure that we're using. Because today, for instance, if I go to hotmail.com, sign in using my athotmail.com email address, I can go up to options and say upgrade to Outlook. And when I do that, I get all of the new functions of outlook.com. It's just that the email that I'm sending from or receiving to is my athotmail.com address. And so in my case, for instance, you could choose to just keep using your hotmail address at an item, but in my case, I chose to also get an app, 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 when I reply, I can choose to reply from my at Outlook or my Hotmail, 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 much better experience, more forward-looking experience for doing email, but using the same account, same contacts, same emails 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 big changes for the web as opposed to, because we've experienced Metro on devices thus far, right? On the phone, obviously with Windows 8 that'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 big changes to adapt to that or no? 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 probably sounds kind of obvious, but just go look at the other email services that are out there and you'll see that it's not that obvious, or Hotmail for that matter. And so I think that was one of the biggest decisions that we had to make. We also 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 Outlook that looks great and is clearly designed for email. But you'll see another one that as we in the next month upgrade the SkyDrive experience. And 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 it's still the same design principles. So there have been a lot of tweaks on the email formula bringing in... Ross just mute switched me. Sorry, Ross mute switched. There have been a lot of tweaks and pulling in social and integrating more services and chat. For instance, Gchat is in Gmail. A lot of people use it through that. Are there ways you're rethinking actual straightforward email or plan to rethink it or can it be rethought? I think there's...we have some, I think, some smart and pretty powerful tools, but there's definitely a lot of runway. Email is a funny thing because for the most part, email messages are email messages are email messages. And they each get a place in your inbox or in your folder. And it was only until a couple of years ago that we started to realize and deliver features that treated different messages as trying to accomplish very different things. For instance, you look at the email that people receive today, about 50% of it is commercial. Yes. Whether it's a newsletter or a daily deal or a shipping receipt and or a shipping update or anything like that. And each of those, you kind of want to treat a little bit different. Neelai forwards me all his Groupon deals. I do. And I forward Ross all my FedEx notifications. It's very strange. How can you fix that for me? Send me your addresses and I'll start getting you some more of those if you'd like. Oh, good. And so what we've found is, you know, for instance, I do a decent amount of shopping on Amazon and I really want to see shipping updates. I don't really care about the receipt that they send me. And I certainly don't want the email that comes that says, do you want to review the seven products that you've bought? Because if I want to review them, I'll review them. I don't need an email. And so I'm able with with Outlook.com to treat each of those differently and take the shipping receipt, put them off into a folder where I want to store them so that I can check them. Whereas the other things just automatically delete them or only keep the latest version or things like that. Similarly, photos like photos is an area where we put put a bunch of work in because people send photos in different ways. I get you could send me a bunch of JPEGs. You could send me a Flickr link. You could 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 have a question. We think 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 any of 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? What's what's sort of the plan for all the other devices that come into the ecosystem? Yeah, like a native Windows app. Yeah. Yeah. With the with the Windows eight mail app with new versions of Outlook on the desktop and with Windows phone, we'll keep pushing the envelope to make sure that Outlook dot com works beautifully between them and that some of the best features are surfaced in the in the built in app. Are you going to go to a lot of 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 what you're doing with Outlook sounds like at least in a Web client goes a little bit deeper than here's a bunch of mail. We'll filter it locally or we'll do some local operations once it comes through the pipe. Yeah. Are you going to are the are the apps going to go deeper than just sinking over IMAP in exchange to Outlook? Are they going to is there going to be a deeper integration and what kind of a standard? Yeah, there's more that we can do there. We just released Outlook for the first time this week, and so I'm not going to go into more of the things that we're thinking about, but we certainly think we can just exciting. Will I be emailing over pop three with my Xbox? Oh, my God. That pop three on the Xbox. You'll be apparently going through your friends group on. Oh, good. I'm curious for you. Are you a getting things done guy? What's your actual personal approach to email? I am a do you win against the email? No, I'm a Pilar. You know, I'm I'm someone who leaves things in my inbox who I'm pretty zen about. I am always kind of on top of things. And if I see something that I need to do, I'll GTD 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 Pilar's, which is partly 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 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 any time I email myself, either from my work account or from my personal account, it automatically flags. And so that ends up for the things that I'm worried I might forget about. That's the way that I stay on top of it. Is there a 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 running in Silverlight or HTML 5 or something like that? I don't know. They'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 email on their phone or they're using the native mail client. And so the vast majority of people that use mail on iPhone are using mail. 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 that just the things that you want in your inbox are there and you can quickly triage through your mail the stuff that actually matters on your phone. Well, I know you're kind of short on time, so I just want to wrap. I mean, I think my biggest question. Oh, you got time. You can stay on the whole time. You have an hour. I love the whole time. Well, you know, my question is we're talking about all these features that we add to mail and like new interfaces. And it just to me comes back as email the right solution. Right. Ultimately, like when my parents interact with email, like I 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. You know, you send an email, click this link and like automatically you're like fished off into the world. Is that the right solution? Is a more real time solution like Paul saying, more of a chat integration. You've got Skype. Is this the right thing? Google Wave is open source. Yeah, you can take some open source Google. But you know, I mean, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're like, you know, my brother-in-law is 20. He never he doesn't use email. He doesn't have an email address. He just uses like Facebook messaging. Now is that is that living in the past or living in the future? I don't I don't know. Yeah. It's just a man about time. Let's ask Brian. What does it mean? I think I think that everybody people are going to 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 to 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, email is part of the solution because it fills the needs that 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 kid's birthday party, it's pretty easy to do via email. But it 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 sure that that's done in a smart way. And you can stay 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 the outlook and that kind of thing. And so it'll be it'll be interesting to watch. Let me ask you, what is your where should your contact list live? Where's the canonical store for your contacts? Because I I wanted 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. And that's not workable for most people. I know a lot of people just want it to be Facebook because that's the friend list they're managing anyway. But that doesn't work for work. So then you 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? 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. Our approach and point of view on this one is that almost everyone is going to have multiple contact lists. And so the key isn't to try and create one grand unification theory of contact lists. Instead, it's to make sure that they connect together in the right ways. So when you want to actually use your contacts, you can do that. And so, for instance, I have my kind of personal work connections in LinkedIn. I have my friends in Facebook. I have my official work contacts in Exchange. And then I have the kind of closest friends information in my phone. And so which ends up being meeting really in my email because the items that I save on my phone are going into my Outlook account. And so our approach is 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 to Outlook.com. And because of that, I can access any of the contact information from those. And they're nice because I don't have to keep updating things. They just automatically sync whatever's latest. Until Facebook makes everybody's default email address at Facebook.com, thus ruining your contact list. Right. I mean, isn't that the danger? They fixed it, though. They did. Well, they kind of. They did something. They pushed a different, less crappy button. At that instance, maybe we, you know, more people will start putting their contacts in their email. We can certainly do live contact in email. And so, you know, there's a push and pull. I got to say, for Neil's question, whoever owns my canonical list is whoever gives me the best UI to weed through it. Right. And what sucks is that my best UI is the address book. But every time it accidentally or for whatever reason, ends up getting synced up with Gmail. Yeah. It gets totally destroyed. And now my. So the core list is in the worst interface. Yeah. I don't know that I have a contact list anymore. I just have a lot of services that compete. There's like the first entry in my list is something like ABC. I don't even know. Not the TV station, just like ABC plumbing or something like that. Your contact list is now like a phone book from the 40s. Yeah. I synced with the Yellow Pages from the 1940s somehow. Oh, shoot. I had it. Oh, so excuse my ignorance. But are you guys putting any features in Outlook that are, you know, business outlook style like meeting invitations or like, you know, calendar invites or something that happens to me all the time is somebody will send me an email and then they'll attempt to recall it using outlook functionality that obviously doesn't exist. You mean they'll send the read that message real quickly signal? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the drone and then I'll send them the I don't use outlook signal, which is saying, I'm sorry, I read the email. I'll send them lololol. Wait, are those features? You know, I mean, that's a frustrating thing for me. I don't I never used Facebook a lot. And but I get invited to things all the time in Facebook. And so I sometimes I would notice them at RSVP. But then, you know, that information never makes it onto my calendar that, 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 mapping service. It's just stuck there in Facebook. Is that something you guys are working on? Yeah, some of the some of it we still have 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 slide into Windows eight 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 at the people in and calendar app on Windows eight 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 so I think we're doing a pretty good job of 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 their 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 dot com and pick the best features and implement them in both. So actually, I think that's kind of a 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 and Windows eight and now even a Metro style Web app. Which one is the right one? I mean, which one which one is the one that people are supposed to use? I guess is the right question. 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 eight desktop, a Windows eight laptop and a Windows eight tablet. Do you think you have too many computers? Yeah, yeah, I think that's an issue. And in the case of I haven't I haven't decided to avoid the interwebs this year. Yeah, I'm working hard on my desktop. On my desktop, I use outlook for both my personal email and for my work email. And I love it on my tablet. I use the built in Windows eight mail app because it works so great on touch. It's not that outlook dot com doesn't work well on touch, but this thing is just built for the Windows eight environment. I love that. And then and that one has both my exchange, my work email, my Microsoft dot com address, as well as my at outlook dot com email going into it. And then on my laptop, I tend to use outlook for my work and outlook dot com outlook outlook dot com for my personal just because I'm used to doing Web mail on that machine. And so I think it'll kind of be common that people are just picking what's the best tool for the different device that we're using. Yeah, we're not trying to say that there's one that's best in all cases because 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 is such a primary thing that I do with a PC that I want. I always want the native experience. So if I'm sitting on my desktop and I'm opening Gmail dot com in a browser, I'm like, why didn't I open a mail app? Actually, you know what I do a lot of you spare. Do you use what's the one that's in now? I don't use what's the one with the multi logins, but the Web interface fluid to use that I do. Yes, 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 use 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. Is that something I mean, is that something you're going to want like outlook users to do or are you going to say, well, we built the native app. Why don't you just use the native app? Because to me, that's actually a really common Gmail use case that I see. Everybody at the verge, except for Paul, who doesn't use the Internet, breaks out Gmail into an app because we use Google apps for business. Yeah, but you've kind of had to do that because you had to hack around the fact that otherwise you'd have to sign in, sign out, sign in, sign out, sign in, sign out. That go from your work to home. And so you're not you're not solving some, you know, core email problem by doing that. You're just hacking around how Gmail works. Yes. It is the IR blasters of email. Have you ever considered using one of Microsoft's fine email products? I will now. I mean, I think Brian will agree. In our case, go ahead. In our case, our approach is use different accounts for work and for home. Yeah. And you can either pull them like I have my work account in my home account. I'm going in outlook for me or if I wanted if I like the Web interfaces better, I could be signed into both Office 365 using Microsoft.com as well as signed into outlook.com. And I don't have to use something like fluid in order to create different WebKit instances or whatever. I can just be in there in whatever browser I have. And some people will do that. It's amazing to me sometimes now how many people only want to use Web now. Yeah. That feels a little. To me, it feels a little backward looking, but I also like Web now so I can get that. Yeah. The other hack that people have to do sometimes around Gmail is there's native apps for a given mail service or not good data 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 conditioned 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 can 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 it to work the way that you'd expect. All right. Last question. What's the next move for Outlook? And what's your favorite thing about Gmail? Don't listen to Paul. Paul Paul is he doesn't get to troll people in real life. Now, my favorite thing about Gmail is how easy it is to forward into my outlook account. Oh, smooth. Brian Hall is smooth. Oh, the 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 of stuff that we've heard. Here's what we're going to do about it. Or here's here's what the real deal is. And so the feedback is super helpful. And we look forward to getting more of that. We definitely have some fit and finish and clean up and finish the design work that we're going to release. As I mentioned, we'll have a new version of SkyDrive out this month that 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 and then we're very excited to get Skype integrated in. Right. And so those are the those are the main things in front of us. But we're going to learn more. Great. Well, it's really exciting. It's it's I will say seeing a company like Microsoft is going through a huge range of changes. Abandon a brand like Hotmail and say we're starting over, starting fresh. I mean, Hotmail has a lot of baggage. And to say we're starting over a 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 have a Gmail addiction problem. But I'm you know, I've read. Oh, I have one. I actually have a real last question. Why did you not register Balmer at Outlook.com and do not reply at Outlook.com? What happened there? You're like, let's see what the let's see what the morons do. Do not reply might have been an oversight. But the good news is nobody will reply. On the other, you know, at some point you 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 Balmer didn't want like did you did you I mean, did you pick up Brian Hall at Outlook.com before it went live? I did not. You did not. Wow. I have I have his Brian. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't I didn't go pick a whole bunch of a whole bunch of different different variations or anything like that. Because I got an email address that I wanted. It'll work great. Yeah. But nobody was ever like, Steve, let's demo that. Let's demo that for you by creating an account that never. I mean, it's just wild. Have you seen Balmer on Balmer? Is that I bet that's you. Are you is that you yourself? I have. I have seen it. Yeah. Once again, once again, never, never try it out with the interwebs. The what I will say is partly no less than 100 people probably inside the company. Yeah. Knew what we're doing, a branding perspective. And so there wasn't even a like internal company only go reserve your names kind of a thing that happened before we released it. It was game on. Yeah. I mean, it was crazy. I mean, literally our office tried to register everything. Yeah. I have Steve Steve Wozniak. I don't know. I did. I'm glad we can name. Well, don't worry. I will troll you from an endless array of hot outlook addresses from now until the end of time. Brian, it's an early good having you on, man. Come back. Come back soon. Maybe in a year. I'll be back on the Internet. He'll let you know what he thinks about outlook. I will. I look forward to that. All right. Thank you. See you, man.