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Hotmail Means to Double Gmail Storage
deputydink writes "Osviews reports that Microsoft's free email service, Hotmail, is throwing down to Google by increasing the free storage to 2GB! I wonder how choked the Hotmail Plus subscribers will be."
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2GB. That's nice and all, but when are they going to actually deliver on the 10MB they promised everyone? I don't use Hotmail, but my girlfriend does, and I'm unable to send her any attachments larger than about 500k because she keeps old emails...
I see no reason why google won't just increase their space by the same factor. Noone will use more than a few hundred megabytes (assuming you have rules that prevent online backups etc)
So storage space is no longer the big attraction, since everybody can get lots.
;)
I bet the next big thing will be from whoever reaches the 700mb attachment limit
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
Microsoft paid, what, $400 million for Hotmail. Then they must have paid quite a bit to port the back end to Windows. Now they are going to have increase the hardware of the back end considerably to compete with Gmail. And it's a free service.
Is that good business?
So far, it seems like it is all rumors.
First we heard that they were going to up to 250MB. Hasn't happened yet. Now 2GB. I'm not holding my breath.
If Hotmail would actually filter spam, and do something about the headache-inducing interface, -that- would be an improvement. Thank goodness for gotmail!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The coolest thing about gmail is the software itself, not the storage. It's excellent. I wish we had it at work-- no more searching for that e-mail someone sent you 6 months ago that you're sure you put in the "coding" folder-- or was it "scripting", or "ai", or "todo"? You could always use that global e-mail search function that only takes about 20 minutes. But hey, you're too busy slogging through tons of other e-mail you just got, because your filters suck.
I don't see why I'd WANT to keep 2 gigs on my hotmail account, unless they make it as full-featured and easy to use as gmail.
The storage isn't the biggest reason why I love gmail so much, it's the features that it brings with it. The ability to search through my mail, the technique of orginization using labels, the conversations being kept together and easy to read. Doing active development and being active on mailing lists gets a lot easier when I can click on a conversation, read the last six emails in that thread and get up to speed on what the problem is. Hotmail may go to 2GB, but that's nothing without all the other features that gmail offers.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
In my opinion, 1 GB is already so much that other features matter when I decide what mail service to use. It's not like a 10 GB mail service is 5x better than a 2 GB one. And it's not like this change would make Hotmail twice as good as Gmail.
I'm not saying this just because I like Gmail, since I *would* consider another service if Gmail just offered 20 MB while another offered 1 GB. It's just that these storage spaces are no longer an issue for me at 1 GB.
More like the opposite -- risking having so much mail and suddenly something bad happens to the online service.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
They say that they are going to increase the limit on the 2 meg accounts "by the end of the summer", which gives them roughly a month until the first day of fall before I can call them a liar.
I suspect they are dragging their feet to squeeze all the upgrade money they can from the 2 meg accounts.
Also, I'm sure that there will be major strings attached, like having to sign in to your account every three weeks or lose it.
Alternatively, they may be dragging their feet because there are serious technical issues at hand, like with everybody letting their accounts fill with spam, which means they have will actually have to deliver tera/petabytes of storage.
The only thing I use my hotmail account for is for when people get really pushy for an email, I give them my hotmail address.
But I agree with an earlier poster, I don't need 2 gigs. Just deliver on 15 megs.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
It's a war, but it's not going to be about storage. Gmail doesn't need to match Hotmail on the 2GB storage (at least yet).
Hotmail is offering 2GB because that's all they got up their sleves. Gmail is a *huge* improvement over Hotmail on the user interface level. And the Gmail spam filter is pretty awesome.
Storage is only a factor until a certain degree - meaning that 2MB is nearly impossible to live off of, but beyond 1 GB you are just talking wasted space for most users.
Some may disagree, but at least in the near future, as far as e-mail is concerned - 1 GB will more than suit 97% of the webmail users out there.
Right now I don't see Gmail touching their storage level. First and foremost they will focus on the user experience, new features, server availability, etc. Then maybe down the line when they see a large threshold of their users in need of more space, they will either then up the storage on all accounts, or offer paid premium accounts.
And on an extra note as a Hotmail user, I don't trust anything they are saying right now, they promised more space like months ago and still haven't delivered. I love my Gmail though.
I guess it is about equal with the devil that "reads your email" to determine whether or not it is spam. The personalized ads thingy is probably just an add-on module to their spam filter. Two faces of the same program. Nothing to see here, move along...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Pft, hot air everywhere. In germany gmx.de offers 1 GB free storage, POP3 access and WebDAV for your files. Simply type webdav://mediacenter.gmx.de/ in Konqueror and up- and download your files. Great free service.
I agree. Hotmail is going to be cluttered with ads. Microsoft needs to learn that simplicity = success.
I think adding more space is missing the point.
Improving the user interface, fulfilling promisses to the userbase, and making the process of web-email more straightforward should be their focus. Not supersizing their accounts.
Taking a look at the hotmail site, I am reminded of college bulletin boards where advertisements and flyers are stapled to the wall haphazardly, each trying to grab your attention when all you really wanted to find was that note your friend left you on the board.
Google's Gmail is the information frontdesk at a five star hotel where you walk by, ask if you have any messages, and get on with your life.
If MS/Hotmail is just throwing space/money at the problem, then they are missing the point entirely and will just be wasting money. Not that that's stopped them before or that that seems to matter to them much.
Winged Power Photography
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just read your journal.. Damn dude you are angry!
I have to admit that large corps rarely have anything human to say to their subscribers (paying or not), take eBay for instance, you can't even speak to a human, its all automated and the people behind it are locked away behind closed doors. Ever tried complaining to ebay? They closed my account for non payment of £1.12. They send emails out with "do not reply to this address" how on earth am I supposed to contact you then? Carrier pigeon? No I have to use the crappy contact system and go around in the endless loop of automated answers.
I have a theory - The bigger the company is, the bigger percentage of idiots working for said company. Read into that what you will.
Does anyone noticed that prices reduced for Yahoo biz mail http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/bzinfo/prod/bemail/ compare_mail_packages.php and Yahoo web hosting http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/bzinfo/prod/wh/comp are.php, which includes tons of space ($11.99 pm == 25 EMAIL ID [ 2 GB each], 2 GB hosting space, and other stuff). Wow they are ahead of every one
Many services now crossing 1 gig mark, (http://fearside.org/~vivekgite/gmail-watch/ look right side Bigger the better - MailBox); EAST or WEST gmail is best of free email, but for "Small Business" yahoo rocks.
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
"Gmail looks like it might become popular!"
"Oh, that's no problem. Gmail's got 1GB, we'll respond in kind and give all those bastards TWICE as much!"
"Wow, Johnny, if 1GB is good, imagine how neato 2GB would be!"
Talk about linear thought. Google does something new, so Hotmail's solution is to replicate that something new + 1 (except entirely without the newness). And of course they leave out in their plans all the things more complicated for committees to understand, like Gmail's improved usability. "Google has 1GB!" is probably as much they could grasp of the situation, because it's certainly all they've responded to.
Maybe in you alternate universe, PC fans are noiseless.
Maybe in you alternate universe, it is OK to spend tens (hundreds ?) of Watts to power an otherwise useless machine.
" I have all the backup e-mail storage space I want on my own Personal Computer. How many people honestly need instant access to an old e-mail from two years ago from anywhere on the web?"
Quite true in many cases, but there are good reasons for using webmail (combined with IMAP, if possible!) It is great to have consistent layout of saved mailboxes available on multiple computers, for example. It's also nice to have saved messages available when out of town, if you don't use a laptop. Finally, your address stays the same if you switch ISPs, and even keeps working if you don't have any internet service for a while.
That said, I would not use a web-only mail service myself. I'm just saying there are uses for it. Personally I have my own domain name, set up with IMAP and SquirrelMail pointed at it -- all the advantages of webmail without the annoyances.
So you're obviously that "green" a person that when you get up from the TV at night to go to the toilet, you turn off the TV and light in your sitting room, go to the toilet, come back and turn them both on agian before sitting down, do you? Plus you must use low wattage light bulbs throughout your house and you cannot use a microwave oven because it is far more energy efficient to cook all of you food "en masse" in a large gas oven. Do that, then you have a right to complain about my server wasting a few hundred watts.
As to "otherwise useless", the same machine hosts a few of my web sites, acts as an SFTP server for a few of my buddies to use, occasionally gets fired up as a Doom, Unreal Tournament or Quake server, handles about a dozen email accounts shared between my girlfriend and I, acts as a syslog server to the rest of my home network and has a firewall on it also.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It is not financially efficient to be your own webmail provider. The power consumption of even a lowly Pentium costs more than luxurious commercial webmail. That doesn't even include your time, because like it or not, offering _anything_ on the wild wild net requires that you keep up to date with bugfixes for all software which handles unsafe data. That means SSH, mailsucker, webmail-scripts, webserver, dynamic DNS software and your OS.
Hotmail is big, fat, slow and bloated i only use it because i still get emails there, my 2MB of space is always full and waiting for it all to load if im on a slow connection or pc is just torture. Gmail is super fast, efficiently designed and a pleasure to use. Hotmail could offer 100GB and Gmail would still be in the hearts of many, even so with all the money going into google right now they could probably keep their space higher than Hotmails for a long time..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Depends. I can see both sides of this arguement
I do it for fun and for education. I have set up a linux server I believe to be secure in that it is updated with the latest security patches at least daily via the automatic update facility and more frequently if I catch the announcement email and do it myself.
The server can be ssh'ed into from my internal network and from my workplaces NAT'd address. Because we have a VPN solution I can VPN into work and SSH to home, which is convenient.
It also provides secure POP, SMTP, web, and storage via SFTP. Is it a lot of work? Some; I do check the logs, do patches manually when I catch them as I said, configure, and reconfigure; but that is part of the educational factor.
If your only motivation is to have virtually unlimited email storage, it probably is not worth it. Not to mention you wont have some of the fancier features that something like gmail might provide. If though, you want to provide yourself with a few other services, and a learning experience, then I would argue that yes, possibly it would be good to set yourself up at home.
So, let me get this straight:
You bought a BETA Gmail account off ebay - a pretty stupid thing to do since its easy to get your own one for free - and started using it as your primary email address.
Now that its gone you're complaining at google for taking away your BETA Gmail account which you bought under dubious circumstances.
I'm sorry, I have no sympathy for you - you're just an idiot.
Gmail is certainly not all about storage. It's about the Search, Labels, Conversation, and lightning-fast interface leveraging that storage space that lets me manage my email in ways I never could before. I have yet to find a (free) Web-based email service offers the speed and flexibility in managing my emails that Gmail does. I have emails dating back to 1998, and Gmail lets me find the information I need quickly. And Gmail's ads are non-intrusive and often useful. Hotmail could provide a terabyte of storage, but the intrusive, flashy ads make the experience nothing short of annoying. Even if Gamil charged for their service, I'd pay for it because of its functionality. It truely is in "the Google way".
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Seems unlikely. I'm guessing their business case for Hotmail is at least partly based on advertising revenue, and this is usually largely dependent on number of (independently verified) page hits, so the more you use them, the more demand they get for (and the more they can charge for) advertising space.
Precisely. You can think about it like this:
Disk space is cheap. When you give users 2GB of disk space, they don't really use it all up. The disk space is not pre-allocated and immediately consumed. Thus, 2GB is really more about users' perception of Hotmail's offering, and this positive perception comes at a low price (again: disk space is cheap)
On the other hand, it costs a lot to pay a few dozen developers to add valuable, innovative new features, such as GMail's labels.
It also costs a lot of money to market Hotmail, to evangelize and to hype it, which is what people are doing with/for GMail for 'free'.
In conclusion, it's easy and not that expensive to just throw 'we offer 2GB' on the site, but it is expensive to add features and market the service.
Simpy
Well, if you check your Address Book, there is a link to "Import Contacts" near the top, which if you've been checking the help section and feedback sections, has been listed for ages. They even have a whole guide to importing if you have trouble.
And, looking at the Help section, they're looking at implementing a plain HTML version too.
Yes, .Mac comes with 100MB of online storage, but you can only use 15 of that for mail.
.Mac account that cost me 13,900 yen per year and unless they up that to at *least* 1GB by renewal time, I won't be renewing.
.mac account is up for renewal soon and I don't think I'll be renewing it. .mov or .mp3 that I create. I tend to feel resentful when I get that "over quota" message on my email, when I have paid for other storage that I cannot use as I like.
I have a
Yes, it includes other things, like a virus checker. WTF?
I don't need a WebDav server for files - I use Samba over an SSH tunnel to my home server. It's a lot faster and more convenient.
The other things they offer, like game trials and discounts on magazines really strike me as the kind of thing I could get for free if I dug around.
I just wrote them a note to let them know how I feel about it:
Hi.
My
The quality of the service has been great, but simply put, 15MB is too little storage for email.
I have little use for the other 85MB of storage, except for occasionally putting up a
For $99 a year, it really should be something like 5-10GB.
Thanks,
Jim
http://www.wirefarm.com
-- My Weblog.
Storage is only a factor until a certain degree - meaning that 2MB is nearly impossible to live off of, but beyond 1 GB you are just talking wasted space for most users.
You are right, but look at that fact another way: the vast majority of users can't begin to fill 1GB in the foreseeable future. (I got a gmail account some weeks ago, subscribed it to LKML, and every other high-traffic linux list I could find - and it's now at only 15%.) Once capacity gets beyond about 100MB, most users won't come anywhere near their limit in the next couple of years.
In fact, I'd bet that Google probably doesn't have enough disk space on hand for n users * 1 GB. They're probably under by (WAG) 90%. But that makes sense - why buy all the storage they're going to need right now if most if it is going to sit empty? With disk drives falling in price every day, it makes sense - especially at that scale - to purchase space only as it's needed.
Therefore, Google's 1GB limit doesn't really mean anything, except as a foil to those few radical cases who see free storage as a chance to mail their pr0n collection to themselves, thus achieving an offsite backup. For most users, the limit might as well be 2GB. Or 10GB. Or 100GB. Given that (a) most users can't use all their space and (b) Google's not buying drives for that empty space anyway, then the limit becomes just a marketing tactic... but a good one, considering how much attention it has gotten for gmail.
The guys over at Hotmail are just now figuring this out.
My guess: when gmail is finally opened to the public, it will at least match the free storage of any other service out there, if not exceeding the others. Maybe 2GB, maybe 5GB, but I expect to see more that 1GB.
You're comparing apples to oranges. The only way Gmail can offer 1GB or space on their email accounts is that the majority of people will probably not use it. And with attachments limited to a certain size, it isn't easy to fill up. However with iDisk, if you're paying for that space you will most likely use it, and since iDisk doesn't have attachment limits it is also easier to fill. That said, iDisk pricing is a bit steep, but comparing it to gmail isn't really fair.
The big advantage to me is that I can get a hotmail account or two right now - I can't get a Gmail account. And that's the same for 1000's of other users.
So right now, a 2Mb free hotmail account is much more atractive to me than a 1Gb but-you-can't have-one-yet Gmail account !
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