Hotmail tycoon comes to town

MUMBAI, Feb 21: Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail, was in the city today to flag off the website MumbaiMart, which aims to be the author...

MUMBAI, Feb 21: Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail, was in the city today to flag off the website MumbaiMart, which aims to be the authoritative guide to the city. For the start-up site, there couldn’t have been a better example to emulate. Bhatia’s success story has acquired a legendary halo among cyber crowds, especially after he sold his Net-baby, Hotmail to Microsoft — reportedly for $ 400 million. For both firms, it is a wedlock made in heaven. Microsoft, the largest software company and Hotmail, the largest E-Mail firm was made for each other. One dominates the products market while the other, the service segment. The merger gave Microsoft a ready gateway to distribute its products on the Net and made Hotmail the largest on-line service.

“A marriage of the desk-top world with the Internet world,” says Bhatia. The deal was also an upshot of the sweeping change in the competition landscape. Their rival, Rocketmail, was acquired by Yahoo, forcing Hotmail to reevaluate its options and seek a bigpartner. “And what better partner could one have hoped for than Microsoft?” says Bhatia. Also, if the merger had not happened, no doubts their paths would have collided in the future. “Now we are partners. With the kind of resources they have, we wouldn’t want to compete with Microsoft,” he adds.

A Bangalore boy, with a stint at at BITS, Pilani, was destined for higher things. He went to Caltech and Stanford in the US followed by stints at Apple Computers and FirePower.

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But his success graph took off exponentially when he, along with partner Jack Smith, started Hotmail, the first E-Mail service on the Net. The concept was simple, elegant — and immensely successful. It evolved out of the absurd situation that to communicate with each other, they needed multiple accounts. Obviously, everything would be simplified if there was just one common meeting point — the ubiquitous Internet.

So, on July 4, 1996, with $300,000, the duo set up Hotmail. It was platform-independent, required no additionalsoftware or configuration, and was available free on the Net. Revenue would come from advertisements, Ecommerce and premium services.

Hotmail became one of the hottest success stories and currently has 12-and-a-half million subscribers, 40 million page impressions every day and has subscribers in 230 countries.

But Bhatia contents that his fairy tale story would not have been possible in India with its “excessive government regulations that stifle enterprise”. In addition, there is a lack of infrastructure, venture capital and “the culture of taking risks”, he points out. In fact, the pioneer plans to grow with Microsoft for the next three years and then let loose his creativity and business acumen once again with new ventures. “Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur,” he says.