Hotmail - Is anyone listening?

Why does Hotmail continue to be such a usability disaster? Has Microsoft given up on making this product easy to use?

The difficulties begin right at login. You need to type in an entire email address. Ok, there's ' save email address' option, but what if you have more than one ID? All the other web mail offerings let you sign in with just a user name at any time.

After signing in, there's a meaningless screen that tells you what email is new, from my contacts, and what is junk. More often than not, I find legitimate email in the junk folder.

The inbox screen is completely non intuitive. Composing an email requires looking for some button that says 'new'.

There are too many intermediate 'confirmed' screens to wade through to get anything done. Sure, Yahoo mail has similar stuff, but somehow it seems cleaner and quicker.

I like Gmail's no nonsense approach the best, and I don't care about the text ads. They do not bother me. It has everything that users need - easy to find anything, everything is saved, it's fast, and is thus a complete usability delight.

Once upon a time - Hotmail ruled the net. I think it now ranks a distant third or fourth in favorable ratings.