Hotmail by Sabeer Bhatia

Hotmail is considered one of the very first free web-based email services in the world. The person behind its creation is also an Indian, Sabeer Bhatia. Sabeer along with one of his colleagues, Jack Smith, launched hotmail.com on July 4, 1996, that was later acquired by Microsoft.

Sabeer Bhatia briefly worked for Apple Computer (as a hardware engineer) and Firepower Systems Inc. He, along with his colleague Jack Smith, set up Hotmail on 4 July 1996, American Independence Day, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based e-mail and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world^{[citation needed]}

As President and CEO, Bhatia led Hotmail until its eventual acquisition by Microsoft in 1998 for an estimated $400 million. Bhatia worked at Microsoft for one year after the Hotmail acquisition and in April 1999, left Microsoft to start another venture, Arzoo Inc, an e-commerce firm with investment from Mohammed Asif, a top Indian-American banker at JP Morgan.^{[citation needed]}

Bhatia started a free messaging service called JaxtrSMS. He said that JaxtrSMS would do to SMS what Hotmail did for e-mail. Claiming it to be a disruptive technology, he says that the operators will lose revenue on the reduction in number of SMSes on their network but will benefit from the data plan that the user has to buy.^[5] To date, JaxtrSMS service has failed to replicate the success of Hotmail. Recently^[when?], he invested in email collaboration software, ccZen and another e-commerce technology provider E-junkie.