"This will probably appeal to Microsoft loyalists and those tied to the Outlook email client. However there aren't any features here that on their surface appear revolutionary," Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence said via email.

Launched on Tuesday in public preview mode, Outlook.com will eventually replace Hotmail, and Microsoft expects that it will also steal users from competing consumer webmail services like Google's Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

that its goal with Outlook.com is to "reimagine personal e-mail -- from the datacenter all the way to the user experience," Microsoft is presenting it as a next-generation product that offers significant advances and improvements over Hotmail and competing services.

Microsoft highlighted Outlook.com's "clean" and "intuitive" user interface, which prioritizes messages over elements like headers and search boxes, and which doesn't feature display ads.

Microsoft also trumpeted Outlook.com's ability to be synchronized across a variety of devices, and its native integration with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and, in the near future, Skype.