One million users sign up for Hotmail successor Outlook.com

Outlook.com, successor to Hotmail, has seen over 1 million people sign up in just a few hours, Microsoft said. The sign-up figures for Hotmail's successor were tweeted by @Outlook yesterday  just over six hours after the  announcement of the new service.

The changes would include the new email address @outlook.com which would replace the older @hotmail.com address, that has been in use for over 10 years.

Users can already "Upgrade to Outlook.com" to keep their existing address.

The new web-based email service would eventually integrate Skype, that would be a new rival to Gmail-embedded Google's Talk service. The software behemoth acquired Skype for $8.5 billion last year after European regulators gave the nod to the deal (See: European Commission approves Microsoft's $8.5-bn acquisition of Skype).

However, the real measure of success, according to analysts would be if existing Hotmail users were to switch voluntarily to Outlook.com.

Google, with 425 million users is ahead of Hotmail, which had approximately over 350 million at the last count.