Sabeer Bhatia @ Hotmail: The Engineer Who Made Email Free

If you used the Web in the late 90s or early 2000s, there’s a good chance you had a Hotmail email account. At the very least, you knew plenty of people with one. After all, at its peak, 25% of Internet users had Hotmail accounts. As a result, lots of people associate the creation of email with Hotmail.

But Hotmail didn’t invent email. Not even close. The first digital messaging systems current users would recognize as “electronic mail” were being used all the way back in the 1960s, and Hotmail didn’t launch until 1996.

For what it’s worth, Hotmail didn’t even invent Web-based email (a.k.a. “webmail”). Webmail first appeared in 1994. Instead, Hotmail’s innovation was to make email broadly accessible to anyone -- for free -- via a browser.

Of course most people today do -- or at least can -- access their email through browsers. But, in the mid-1990s, that wasn’t the case. Instead, reading emails required an email client. That was fine if you were on your own computer. But what if you weren’t near your computer? Or what if you didn’t even own your own computer? How were you going to read your emails? That's the problem Sabeer Bhatia, Hotmail's founding CEO, helped solve. You'll learn how in this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.