Review: Microsoft's 'Kahuna' Falls Short: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Review: Microsoft's 'Kahuna' Falls Short: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance: "AP
Review: Microsoft's 'Kahuna' Falls Short
Thursday April 6, 4:52 pm ET
By Joe Bel Bruno, AP Business Writer
Review: Microsoft's New 'Kahuna' Live Mail Product Falls Short

NEW YORK (AP) -- I signed up for my first Hotmail account in 1996 when a tech-savvy friend told me it would be part of the wave of the future.

'Imagine it, this e-mail address travels with you,' he said. 'You don't even have to be on your home computer.' I quickly signed up and have been hooked ever since.

But somewhere along the line, it seemed as if Microsoft Corp. just stopped caring about the free Web-based e-mail service it bought in 1997. The once-groundbreaking Hotmail quickly became a dinosaur to feature-rich rivals from Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.

For years, loyal Hotmail users like me -- unwilling to give up our longtime e-mail addresses -- waited patiently for Bill Gates and company to catch up.

Enter Microsoft's Hotmail overhaul -- code-named 'Kahuna,' so-named to reflect what the company considers a big wave of innovation. For now, though, Kahuna falls short.

About 1 million of Hotmail's 230 million active users are now using a 'beta' test of Kahuna, formally known as Windows Live Mail. The product ties into the rollout of Micr"