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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...
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.
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 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.
" 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.
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