Those of you who have Gmail and love the Gchat feature will likely state that this is one of the reasons that you have stuck with the email client. Google"s chat integration is widely used among Gmail users and Microsoft knew this would be one of the reasons users might hold-out on switching to Outlook.com.
If you found yourself saying, "If only Outlook.com had Gchat support, I would switch", well, today is that day as Microsoft has stated that Outlook.com is getting Gchat support and it is rolling out to the platform as we speak and should arrive on your account in the next few days.
This is surely a welcomed addition to the platform and should help convince a few more users to finally drop Gmail in favor of Microsoft"s new email platform. Outlook.com has been growing steadily since its announcement last July and when you add in all the Hotmail converts, the service has more than 400 million active accounts.
It"s clear the Outlook.com is working at a rapid pace to deliver new features as the past few weeks we have seen quite a few updates from the service make their way into the production platform including a new calendar, new Android app, deeper Skydrive integration, SMTP send and more.
We will be curious to see how long Microsoft can sustain these updates flowing to the platform because if they keep adding features at the current pace, Outlook.com will continue to distance itself from all other services on the web and offer the best-in-class service.
Source: Microsoft