I’ll admit, I haven’t been very nice to Microsoft since I moved to Seattle a few months ago.*See alsoWindows 8 Phone: 4 Things to ExpectBut maybe it’s because they’re kind of like family, a little brother to pick on at dinner. After all, I sit here writing on a Windows operated PC and this morning logged onto my Hotmail account to check my personal email. You read that right: My Hotmail account.The fact that I’ve stuck it out with Hotmail has caught no small amount of grief. It’s given friends an opening to extol the virtues of Gmail – a deathly boring thing to be extolled upon, let me tell you – and an IT guy once literally guffawed (sort of a g-u-u-u-f) when I told him my personal email address.But back to my logging-on this morning. When the browser loaded, I looked upon a beautifully clean page that I had never seen before but immediately could find my way around, quickly deleting the Obama campaign’s latest push for money and then tapping out a few quick notes to friends and family.It was no longer called Hotmail, but rather Outlook, a parlaying of Microsoft’s desktop and web-based email system. I haven’t gone through all the functionality yet, but my first impressions are great.And while Hotmail had a lot of catching up to do – I’m probably wrong, but it seemed like updates sort of stalled after 2005 – when they finally decided to copy and improve on Gmail’s ideas, I think they got it right. I use Gmail for work, and find a lot of the attributes obnoxious Google people brag about lacking. So, here’s to you Microsoft. I hereby declare that I’m sticking with Hotmail, or whatever it’s called now. Piss off, IT guy.