[scholia]

Not exactly ;-)

Many people used Hotmail (originally Hotmail) but many people also used Yahoo Mail (originally Rocketmail), which was generally as good or better.

Unfortunately for those people (eg me), Yahoo Mail is now unusably horrible while the new "Hotmail" is generally as good as Gmail and sometimes better. (The web interface is slower, but if you're concerned about speed then you're not using the web interface.)

[microtonal]

It's a bit of a shame that outlook.com doesn't support CardDAV and CalDAV. But they do provide ActiveSync for mobile devices.