Microsoft will change the hotmail.com web based email over to the newer outlook.com services. All current and new Hotmail address will be migrating in the near future.

Hotmail has, like most web based email clients, changed appearance and functionality slowly over the years since being bought by Microsoft for about $450 million back in 1997. Now, rather than do another make over Microsoft have decided to re-do Outlook.com to offer free email, which is ad supported, and slowly make Hotmail.com redundant.

The new version of the old Outlook.com, says Microsoft, will be a simpler and a minimalism sleek appearance, on a par with Gmail, and will come with  ‘unlimited’ online storage via Skydrive. It will be tightly integrated with many of today’s popular third party services, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This will allow a user to see their contacts updates from those services without leaving Outlook making sharing and updating easier.

Hotmail users can already try out the new Outlook.com email by logging in and swtiching over to the new side, even though it will still be in Preview Mode. It’s also a good opportunity to claim the new ‘@outlook.com’ addresses.  Switiching back to Hotmail will be allowed, but eventually all users will have to migrate. Microsoft has taken a page out of Google’s Gmail in Outlook.com’s construction and operation. The simple and clean interface being one of Gmail’s main user positive point. Hotmail has around 350 million users and Gmail has 425 million.