Microsoft’s mail service Outlook.com has now left Beta and is now ready to take on giant Gmail. Microsoft says that during preview, Outlook.com signed up 60 million users, mostly Gmail converts. Microsoft expects this number to increase rapidly in the coming months and is already migrating Hotmail users to the new Outlook User interface that is minimalistic. Microsoft expects Outlook to scale to a billion users.
According to Microsoft, nearly half of Outlook users have integrated with SkyDrive to share half a billion documents and photos. With the social integration of SkyDrive, users can view updates from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter from within the mail front end. The portion that used to host ads on Hotmail will be replaced by Social Networks feeds. Microsoft is working on newsletter management, mailing lists management and other features.