Gmail Catching up to Hotmail

By Greg McNevin

February 10, 2009: Google’s Gmail is rapidly approaching similar levels of popularity as Microsoft’s Hotmail, so much so that it may overtake the competing service by year’s end.

Hotmail currently boasts around 43.5 million unique monthly users, a clear lead on Gmail’s 29.6 million. However, considering Hotmail has shed 5 percent of these users since 2007, while Gmail has increased its share by 43 percent, 2009 could be the year Gmail eclipses Hotmail if both rates remain somewhat constant.

And there is certainly a lot of incentive for them to do so, as while Microsoft has been slowly upgrading its free webmail service, Gmail’s is easily the superior of the two, particularly considering it has now rolled out offline functionality, removing one of the last barriers between it and Outlook holdouts.

At least part of Gmail’s success can be attributed to Google Labs, which enables the company to rapidly innovate on its product while giving users the ability to test out new features as soon as they become available.

Google says that Labs enables users to test out its ideas for the service, and weed out the good ones from the not so good – a strategy that appears to be paying off seeing as though it is closing in on Microsoft’s webmail turf after a few short years.

If it does surpass Hotmail, Gmail will still have a way to go to catch up with market leader Yahoo!’s 91 million uniques, however, if the current rate of adoption continues the webmail crown could be in its hands by 2011.

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