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Google to Launch Free Mail Service?
prostoalex writes "The New York Times article on Yahoo and Terry Semel's management (soul stealing form required) mentions Google preparing "to offer a free e-mail service, people close to the company said, in a bid for Yahoo's most important source of loyal customers"."
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
If they'll provide POP or IMAP access without having to pay for it like Yahoo!, I'm sure it will be quite succesfull.
thisnukes4u.net
If they can avoid yahoo's extremely bloated interface and stick with google's simplicity for their webmail, the idea might be a winner.
Of course they will need to invest a lot of effort into spam filtering for the service to be of any value.
Or it could be that they don't want someone to use the domain to create a shady business. I thought this was common practice. If they brought this domain in 2001, likelihood is that they brought it more for safety's sake.
You are naive. You probably also believe Apple is a "nice" company, too (see battery replacement plan).
I hate to spoil it for a lot of you people, but Google is no longer run by the engineers. They have a CEO. They also have a bunch of backers who want to get paid a lot of money when this company goes public. They are not in business to make you guys feel good about them. They are in business to make money.
If google can combine targeted text advertising with email (like by analyzing the content of the email) then maybe they can offer some serious competition.
That would be just great. Then we could not only get tons of Viagra and penis enlargement emails, we could also tons of Viagra and penis enlargement targeted text ads. Maybe even all in the same email. Can't wait.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
I beleive if Google has decided to go after new business, it would be because they decided to move into a new market, not because they wanted to act in malace against another company.
That's how every company and every business works in this country. It is for that very reason - direct competition - that we have so many awesome, cool products and services. At the end of the day, consumers want the best value for their dollar, the most choices, the most convenience. It's what a free market is all about.
So consider this, if Google creates an email service, and Yahoo starts to see some of its customers switch to Google, then Yahoo will be in a position to either a) do nothing, or b) offer something new to make Yahoo an even better service than it was before.
At the end of the day, if both services are doing a really good job, then they'll split the user base. But if one is really doing a better job than the other, that one will "win" the majority (usually). End-users will have more choices for web-based email, and we'll possibly see other services created to entice us to switch services.
To the poster (here) who talked about how Google has done one thing, and done it well - yes- that is very correct. However, that was back in 2000. Searching is something Google is undoubtedly "the daddy" off. They have moved on - groups, image search, directory, news - they are all at the top of their respective content leagues in terms of quality and service.
Whether or not the NYT article is correct or not doesn't really matter. The plain fact is that Google faces increases competition, and they need to offer more services to maintain their position as number 1. A Google email service is A) cool B) useful for people. As posters before has said, it would probably come quite feature laden, and thus be popular.
If google really wants to do something worthwhile with email, they should go out and purchase hushmail. I happen to be a big fan of their service (web based PGP compatible email!) but I loathe how *few* people actually use encryption in email. If a powerhouse like google offered not just webmail, but *encrypted* webmail, I bet that the conversion rate would be pretty mind-blowing and voila, the huge bump encryption / PGP / GPG needed to get to the point of critical mass.
Can you imagine a world in which you can say to someone: "what you mean you don't encrypt your emails?" Please make it so google!
Their designers/programmers, happily possess a full set of clues. They understand that the Web is not TV, and that HTML is a carrier for contents, not eye candy.
If they can do this right with free webmail too, they win even more brownie points!
Don't get me started about sites that give you error messages (or worse yet, fail dismally without explanation) simply because you don't have *script or foo-browser-extension from M$.
Or, the even more annoying ones that complain and refuse to let you in when they think you aren't using MSIE but in fact work perfectly if you instruct your browser to lie about what it is.
K*I*S*S!
-- MG
http://images.google.com and search with any of the well known Playboy playmate model names.
Linux at home
The trouble with a modertion system is moderation is often wide of the mark. There are some really good mods, some really bad mods, and many mods who may not be experts in a field but moderate what seems correct to them - when they may be wrong. And as Slashdot proves regarding economics, incorrect opinions get modded up when they are incorrect one.
Moderation is a way to enforce groupthink, not to encourage what is best.
I agree, and I've seen some [laughable,piteous,ignorant] moderation here. However, if it were limited to RELEVANCE, it might still work even if subjective. Find what you're looking for? Mod it up. Misleading header? Mod it down.
Just a thought. I'm mostly wondering whether it's been done already.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
...but you should be expecting problems with a search for something as horribly generic as "motherboard review" anyway. If you search for something that *should* get millions of results, and you do in fact get millions of results, well, you asked for it :)
That's the sort of "problem" with only one solution: the user needs to narrow down the search himself. Continuing the mobo example, by supplying more... like processor architecture, manufacturer, and so on. To expect google to automagically do this FOR you is to defeat the purpose of a useful search engine - you're asking them to make all the choices for you. That's bound to make the wrong choices. Frequently. And it opens up a new way for shadier search engines to take money in exchange for adding bias into their results, or for random scammish web page designers to try to game the system.
The solution is basically what google already does: there's a "search within these results" box you can use to narrow down your search if you got a big pile of uselessly generic results. I suggest you use that.
They are not in business to make you guys feel good about them. They are in business to make money.
Yeah, and the two are, like, totally mutually exclusive, right? Believe it or not, but word-of-mouth is still the most effective form of advertising ever, and the best way to get that is to keep customers happy. In this case, google relies a lot on people telling each other just how cool this search engine is, and how quickly it loads, and how you're not spammed to death with advertisements, and guess what, it bloody works! Every person in my social circle who owns a computer knows google, and that includes some seriously digitally handicapped individuals....hi mom!
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Extrapolate this to any words that somebody would be willing to pay to watch, regarding politics, religion, cults, music, or whatever other creepy corners your paranoia guides you to.
The important difference between targetting ads to web pages vs email is that web pages are designed for wide publication. The contents of email is usually meant to be private.
I am not sure how "insightful" this is.
;-)
Webmail services are not meant to be checked with a mail reader - but with a browswer. MS has hacked something together to make Outlook work w. Hotmail, but that's an exception. Outlook won't be able to check Yahoo mail or your ISP's webmail (though your ISP probably offers POP, which Outlook will gladly check) except through some 3rd party webmail-to-pop utilities.
If Google wants people to use any reader of their choosing to check their e-mail, they will open POP accounts which no "bug" in XP will keep from being accessible.
If Google follows the pattern that Yahoo has - ie, you only get POP when you pay the subscription fee, otherwise use the webmail interface - then it won't work w. Outlook (or Thunderbird or any of them).
Hope this clarifies the magic of e-mail a bit.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
It's that mindset that keeps encrypted email from becoming a standard, and there is a major flaw in it. The real reason for encrypting everything is not so much to protect your photo collection or personal emails, but to completely cripple anyone (NSA, perhaps?) who would want to intercept everyone's email.
Currently, there are very few people using encryption for email, so if the NSA notices that Joe Geek is, they might suspect that he has something to hide and start throwing massive computing resources at cracking his private key. However, if absolutely everyone was encrypting their email, no privacy-invading government org would know whose email to even begin decrypting. Thus, we'd all be safe.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!