Brute Force

Hi, I've been lurking here for some time now and thought it'd be best for me to join the Community. I teach myself how to code on code academy.

Anyway if I wanted to hack a hotmail account, how can I do this? I was thinking of Brute Forcing it, but people say that a some point it'll lock you out. Now only that, but even if the password is only 8 characters long, that still doesn't mean the password will be in the word list. So basically from what people say it sounds like Brute Force is pretty useless. What do you guys think?

An what after some other ways of getting the hotmail password?