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Hotmail, Others Follow Gmail's Storage Boost
BobPaul writes "Following behind Yahoo Mail's recent upgrade to 100MB of free storage, and trailing behind GMail's 1GB (last mentioned here), ZDNet reports that Hotmail will soon boost email storage as well. 'The upgrade will increase Hotmail's free e-mail storage limits from 2 megabytes to 250MB and its paid e-mail service, which costs $19.95 a year, from 10MB to 2 gigabytes. The changes will begin in early July.' Another interesting tidbit from the article: 'Ask Jeeves also plans to grant its e-mail subscribers more storage room... According to an e-mail sent to iWon users, Ask Jeeves plans to give each of the sites' e-mail subscribers 125MB of free storage.'"
Hotmail and Lycos are missing the point here - people aren't flocking to Google cause of the 1GB of space; it's because of the innovative design; the powerful search; the conversation layout; the lack of intrusive ads etc.
They have to fix the fact that their services are crap before handing out space willy-nilly.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
There's more to GMail than pure storage capacity. Personally, i wouldn't consider switching back to Hotmail or any other service until they improve the system in some of the ways Google have -- such as the conversation system for tracking replies, and the searchable "All Mail" folder which holds both incoming and outgoing conversations.
Its funny -- in all the hyperbole about the disk space being offered, people are neglecting some of the real innovations/advancements GMail has managed.
But what good is all that storage space without a proper way of archiving and accessing it?
Remember years ago when the max e-mail size wasn't 2mb and you suddenly got mail bombed? You had to go looking through 100's of pages of mail and deleting all the junk. All that work is enough to give anybody carpel tunnel syndrome. Also, Hotmail's recent restriction on opening only one page at a time only makes the matter worse.
The reason why Gmail can give 1GB of space is because it has developed an excellent system of mail archival, retrieval and display. So unless Hotmail changes its interface and pulls something as good as Google, we are soon going to see frustrated users shifting through many pages of spam.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I have not seen gmail, but I know that one thing that attracted me to google at the start was that on my dialup connection, google was a FAST download, because of its lack of large graphical ads, etc., compared to the slow and bulky yahoo interface. The reason I avoid hotmail and yahoo mail now is because their interfaces are still ad-ridden and bulky and slow as hell on dialup.
If the Gmail interface is as fast as the google interface, gmail will eat hotmail and yahoo for lunch.
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
Granted, .mac does a shitload more than these others, but, hey, it's time to boost! :)
IIRC, yahoo recently advertised an "image free" interface. Never use it myself, but I just checked and there's only a couple of small gifs on the page.
You've obviously not actually used or looked into GMail very much, if at all - as has already been said, the real treat is not the 1GB storage.
The real good stuff comes in the form of a clean and fast interface, being able to use Google search on your mail, threaded display of your messages, having webmail that doesn't blast you with intrusive ads, and so on.
The US continually bought more and more weapons, which it would never use, so that Russia would follow suit -- until Russia bankrupted itself.
Gmail only has a couple of thousand users, so it can continue upping it's storage. Hotmail & Yahoo follow suit, but with it's million users, they asplode!
GMail's rollout appears to have a two-pronged approach: 1) Force other e-mail providers into costly capital expenditures. remember, 1gb of space initially for a couple thousand invitees is still less than 250 mb for millions of users. MS and yahoo's teams will no doubt be prodded to recoup their capital expenditures for all users, while gmail can stay lean and mean as long as it wants, while at the same time dictate the market structure. 2) generate ginormous buzz. As others have said, "why not go to spymac?" The answer for John Q. public lies in the difference in brand equity between spymac and google. If an average user has decided to make a switch over to a new e-mail provider, johndoe@gmail.com is "worth" more than johndoe@spymac.com, regardless of features.
Google may be the poster child for a 'good' corporation but the roll-out of the gmail system is most definitely not one of the better acheievements. By pre-announcing gmail so far in advance, all the other free providers have now upped their storage. While gmail is still not publicly available.
I disagree totally. Gmail's two-phase rollout has given Google the option to observe the competition's response and react to it before their service is even officially launched (not to mention creating a buzz that would make Seth Godin proud).
I've had a GMail account for about two months now and the system is in a constant state of flux. I've reported bugs one day and they've been fixed the next. Each and every bug report or piece of feedback gets a personal response from the Google team. They are very serious about perfecting the system.
The only reason Google are waiting so long to launch it is because they want to make sure it's the best webmail out there bar none. When it's launched, that's when the comparisons can really start. And that's when Hotmail et al won't be able to shake a stick at Gmail.
---- scrm
Why MP3 trading is a foregone conclusion:
1. P2P Applications
2. Binary Newsgroups
3. Bittorrent
4. IRC
5. FTP
6. Messenger to messenger.
6. Now anonymous based e-mail accounts.
The RIAA is currently trying to sue users of #1. They might go after #3, 4 and 5. They can't stop #2 and #6. They've lost, whether you believe that mp3 trading is copyright infringement or not.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I trust Google. I trust Yahoo. I don't trust Microsoft/hotmail.
One of the interesting things about how Google has been able to increase the perceived value of their gmail service is that you need an invite (thanks turg).
It also creates a "web of trust". People who have been invited by other people are less likely to use a gmail account to spamminate everyone. This is the true innovation of gmail.
Consider this scenario:
- Spammer snags a gmail account.
- Spammer gets invite credits
- Spammer "invites" a dozen fake spam accounts to gmail
- Spammer starts using those new acounts as response boxes for spam
- Google flags this
- Google deletes receiving accounts
- Google notes that they all originated from invites from one account.
- Google deletes that account as well.
End result: Spammer has no way to receive his (the vast majority of spammers are guys) responses, goes back to using shotmail or aohell accounts. This results in gmail accounts maintaining their perceived value.Hopefully, someone from gmail will recognize the value of keeping the invite system, either exclusively, or alongside a seperate open system.
Anyone want to point this thread to the gmail developers?