Yahoo Business Email vs Windows Live Hotmail

Long time ago the Internet giant Yahoo! tried its hands in business-oriented projects. Remember, they even bought the collaboration star Zimbra. But then Yahoo! partnered with Microsoft and decided not to compete with the partner. And then Zimbra was sold to VMWare. But one business-oriented service still remains in the Yahoo! portfolio - Yahoo! Small Business, which allows small companies and entrepreneurs to easily create a website, email account and online store. During the recent years Yahoo! changed its executives, priorities and strategies and many services were closed. However, this service has survived for one simple reason - it's really demanded by customers and brings profit to the company. Moreover Yahoo! still finds resources for the further development of this service. Recently Yahoo! Small Business added a free marketing dashboard that allows to monitor Facebook, Twitter and other social networks (for online reputation management), analyze website metrics, submit your site to small business directories, conduct email campaigns. For example, the dashboard enables social media monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, including on Yelp, Yahoo and others.

This is the conclusion of the analytical firm Cascade Insights. According to their report, Windows Live Hotmail is slightly ahead of GMail by this parameter. Yahoo Mail is on the third place but it's far behind the leaders. The rest of the Email-services are far-far behind. We believe this report because the guys from the Windows Live team are fanatically enhancing Hotmail's anti-spam during the last couple of years. Almost every month the Windows Live blog reports that they have reduced the SITI (spam in the inbox) by X%. Moreover, except the anti-spam filters, Hotmail developers recently added some other features to save user's attention. First, (like in GMail) they made the flagged messages displaying at the top of the list (video above). Second, they added categories (video below).

Microsoft has done a great job to confuse users with their online office applications. Office Live, Office Live Workspace, Office Live Small Business, Live Folders, Foldershare, Live Docs, SkyDrive, Live Mesh, Docs.com, Office Web Apps - a lot of similar in functionality or name services, formed in result of numerous acquisitions and rebrandings. Taking into account the existence of Exchange and Sharepoint SaaS versions (BPOS), it becomes a mystery - what Microsoft's online office suite is and what it's target audience. The new version of Windows Live Wave 4 (which includes the online office) is trying to bring this chaos into order, however, again  by the numerous mergers and renamings. Let's try to understand all this stuff.