What are the Differences Between Yahoo and Hotmail?

Today, Yahoo and Hotmail are the most popular email services. Most people use Yahoo and Hotmail for communication.
People depend on Yahoo and Hotmail in their work because the use of these two services is faster, cheaper, and easier. Also, the access to them is flexible. Although Yahoo and Hotmail are almost similar and used for the same purpose, some people prefer one of them than the other. This paper will discuss the reasons of Yahoo and Hotmail popularity among users. This research includes a survey which shows the number of people who use Yahoo and people who use Hotmail. Also, this paper is in order to study the result of the percentage of people who use Yahoo and percentage of Hotmail’s users. Yahoo and Hotmail are obviously the most common web email services today. Their features, capacities and securities are under development every year. If we compare Yahoo and Hotmail to how they were ten years ago, we would be surprised of how they have developed. In fact, some people prefer Hotmail instead of Yahoo while other the other way around, yet a number of people use both. Hence, this paper will help us to observe which email service is used most ? As well, this research will help us to find out which email services do people prefer more and why? Even though Yahoo is similar to Hotmail in function, there are some differences between them.

The similarities between Yahoo and Hotmail are more than differences. Both Yahoo and Hotmail have two creators. A copyright agent of Yahoo, in his article “Yahoo! Media relation”, indicated that the two founders of Yahoo are David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 1994 (Yahoo, 2005). Besides, in the article,”History of Hotmail”, the author, a lead program manager of Hotmail, demonstrated that Hotmail was founded by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia in 1995 (Wikipedia, Aug, 2005). Also, each Yahoo and Hotmail are acronyms (Alyahya, 2004,p1). In addition the copyright agent of Yahoo showed that Yahoo is short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, similarly a lead program manager of Hotmail reported that Hotmail is short form and it included the letters "HTML the markup language used to write web pages. Moreover, the copyright agent of Mail2World presented the idea by given some similarities between Yahoo and Hotmail in their features for instance, Yahoo has a calendar ,strong security, spell checker and Auto virus scanning similarly ,so does Hotmail. In addition, “with Yahoo, we can put our messages in different folders; and, we can create a signature that will be shown on every message we send. Also, we can filter our messages and block senders that we do not want e-mail from, likewise, Hotmail has the same features” (Alyahya, 2004, p1).

Not only there are similarity between Yahoo and Hotmail but also there are differences between them. For example, the capacities between them are diverse. According to the lead program manager of Hotmail in his article “storage of Hotmail” distinguished that Yahoo provides 1GB for free to its users and 2GB given at a price nevertheless, the capacity of Hotmail is 250 MB of free email storage to their American users, and 2 MB of free email storage to their users who out of America (Wikipedia, Aug, 2005). According to author Jessica Aldred in his article” Hotmail Stays on Top of Free E-mail Providers”(Business, May 17, 2000) report that the number of people in Australia who registered accounts in Hotmail grew to more than two million, so in Australia people prefer Hotmail more than Yahoo. Besides, according to the copyright agent of Mail2World in his comparison chart” Mail2world vs. Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail” included that Yahoo doesn’t serve in different languages, however Hotmail serve in many languages. As well, Hotmail has extra features such as stationery, dictionary and thesaurus, although Yahoo doesn’t offer these features. Yahoo has email forwarding, bookmarks and voicemail yet, Hotmail doesn’t (Mail2World, 2005).


Method:
This study shows that the number of people who use Yahoo and Hotmail constantly. 20 people were asked from different countries. Four people are Chinese, four people are Korean, five people from Saudi Arabia, two people from Iran, two people are Israeli, one person from Japan, one person from Taiwan and last one is Vietnamese. Their age’s between18 to 38 and most of them had an experience enough to answer any question about the features and services of the email which they use. Moreover, we demonstrated this survey by given them a form of four main question and they filled it out. As a result, we found out that 25% of people use Yahoo, 50% of people use Hotmail and 25% use both Yahoo and Hotmail. (See the table below)

People who use Yahoo.
25%
People who use Hotmail.
50%
People who use both Yahoo &Hotmail
25%
In this cause, 40% of the people who use Yahoo chose “easy to use”, 30% chose large capacity, 15% chose “many friends use it”, 15% of Yahoo users said they are familiar with it and some people said they like the features of it. On the other hand, 50% of the people who use Hotmail chose “many friends use it” and “It has large email capacity”. Also, 30% of Hotmail users chose “Easy to use” and 20% believed Hotmail has attractive features and strong security. In addition, I request this question in order to investigate the reasons that why the people choose Yahoo or Hotmail.
To sum up, I found that Hotmail is very popular, and if we look at the survey we can observe that ten people prefer Hotmail, five people prefer Yahoo and the other five prefer both Yahoo and Hotmail. Moreover, I believe that people like Hotmail more than Yahoo because Hotmail has a large size and it is uncomplicated to use. Besides, the people use Hotmail more than Yahoo for the reason that features of Hotmail are more attractive than Yahoo. Also, from the articles we can notice that Hotmail has same features which Yahoo doesn’t have for instance, stationery, dictionary and thesaurus. Specially, Hotmail serve in different languages but Yahoo doesn’t, hence, it could be reasons of why most people prefer Hotmail more than Yahoo.