Omar Shahine - Inside Hotmail

Hotmail needs innovation and needs it fast. You know like the innovation or at least the great energy that Microsoft puts into MSN Search. I know, I know, MSN Search is new and needs customers while Hotmail already has many customers and might perhaps not mind losing some. Yes?
Whilst other services add new revolutionary features, the most known example of which is Gmail, Hotmail remains the same old service. Where is a new look, a faster response time, fewer clutter, especially ads, better search and organization facilities, pop3 & imap forwarding (like the out of office assistant), calendar and mail offline backup, rss feeds, Hotmail integration with the desktop or deskbar and with other MSN services, etc, etc. If Microsoft has made one of the best e-mail clients Office Outlook, why not make Hotmail a little as feature rich as this client. At least a little. Hotmail has too many customers and Microsoft is losing them to Gmail. Many of my friend have or think of switching. Why not at least try to upgrate some of Hotmail's offerings, re-energize the Hotmail brand. At least at a minimum? Even the 250 MB is ooooo slow in coming. Yahoo! had upgrated their service much faster. Currently, Google not Hotmail is the cool service.
You need to introduce some new and advanced features and do it now not next next year. Users in this age rely a lot on e-mail. Given that Hotmail is the most popular free service, in order to remain so, needs to work on a new version.
Perhaps MSN should add the ability for online file storage. Like Yahoo briefcase but 250 mb. Why not. After all, this is what people really want, not very large inboxes, but a common large online storage place, easily accessible, like from My Network Places. And remember 2 or even 10 or 30 mb nowadays is a joke.