Google on Thursday rolled out a controversial new feature that lets anyone on Google+ send an email to your Gmail account, even if they don’t have your email address. The new feature provides an interesting glimpse of a unified communications future, but Google did a terrible job introducing it.
More than 18 months after its acquisition of Skype, Microsoft is continuing to integrate the online communication platform into its broader service strategy. The company announced Monday that it will add Skype calling and messaging to its Outlook.com webmail portal. Outlook.com, introduced in 2012 as the successor to Hotmail, is Microsoft’s free online email, contact, and calendar service and has more than 420 million users worldwide. With Skype integration, these users will be able to initiate audio and video chats