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The Webmail Wars
latif writes "Much of the excitement around Gmail has centered around its innovative
interface, but a pretty interface is hardly Gmail's biggest contribution.
Gmail's real contribution to webmail is its innovative business model. The new
business model is what's allowing Gmail to offer 1 GB storage quotas, and still have an expectation of making money. Of
course, Microsoft and Yahoo have noticed this too, and one can reasonably expect them to move
their webmail services to the new model. An interesting battle is shaping up
between the big three webmail providers, and my article "The Webmail Wars" analyzes
some possible scenarios and outcomes."
I still find webmail an interesting phenomenon. I know there are millions of users out there. And I myself find it quite handy when I'm traveling. Being able to hop on any computer, open up a browser, and check my mail is good. But...I still don't use it that much. I have a Yahoo account (I think), I may have done a Hotmail account way back in the day, and I have my Gmail account. But even with those, I use my other accounts MUCH more. I liken it to AOL...I don't fully understand why someone would use AOL when they can get a much less intrusive and cluttered way to get to the Internet, yet they have millions of users. Same goes with my thoughts on webmail...why would someone pay for Internet service and then opt to use Hotmail?
The only answers I can think of is to have a "safe" spot for addresses where you may end up getting a lot of spam. Or "secret" accounts. Or multiple accounts. And that's why I find these webmail wars fascinating...wars are being fought over this with the major players in the industry over something so seemingly unimportant (as say compared to OS wars, browser wars, etc)
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
The primary reason google 'scanning my email' doesnt concern me is that google has a reputation for being honest. That google has attained that reputation gains absolutely nothing for Yahoo (spammer, spam supporter) or MS (convicted monopolist)
I trust google several orders of magnitude further than I would trust Yahoo or MS. I would *never* use a hotmail or yahoomail account for anything other than a throwaway - yet I have in fact started using a gmail account for normal email.
Anyone who lists an @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com email address anywhere even remotely business-related is showing that they are 'part of the consumer herd' - an @gmail.com address, on the other hand, suggests an air of elitism.
If they follow this model, Im sure Yahoo and MS's ads will be flash and javascript popup ridden - Gmails ads are much less intrusive.
Google knew exactly what they are doing - they arent looking for mass market share of morons.
nevertheless hotmail and yahoo have all the accounts. Can they keep their giant market share or will gmail gobble it all up? Also with the mass storage the bigger user bases cost more of a fortune to maintain while google is smaller so its initial investment is smaller. Anwyay the targeted search idea that gmail uses is brilliant. Too bad they had to go and try to file patents on it.
Really, there *is* no privacy issue - I assume your talking about the scanning of emails for targeted advertisment. It doesn't breach your privacy any more than a spam filter or antivirus software, and personally, I rather the adverts be relevant (and discrete) as in Gmail that annoying flashy banner ads in some services.
As I side issue, I use GmailFS to provide an extra, remote drive on my computer - will Google be stamping down on this, do you think?
For all the talk about labels vs. folders, I find labels are counter-intuitive. Here in my filing cabinet I sort documents into folders; I don't stick 3 or 4 different labels on documents and throw them all into the same drawer. It's crazy!
There are missing options like how about being able to permanently turn on Display External Images or turn off Auto Add to Contacts? Yeah, yeah it's Beta but that's actually my point. It's a little early to declare a Beta product the winner. How about we wait until Gmail allows signups before handing them the trophy? Because after all is said and done it isn't any better than Yahoo! mail except for the storage capacity.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
For me, the big difference is the use of text for the ads. Gmail advertising is not in your face. Hotmail advertising is obnoxious. Will MS and Yahoo get it? Can they sell toned-down ads to their customers (advertisers)?
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Sure, email will change. It might not even be recognizable as email anymore. But there is still a need on the internet for some type of "mail" system, where both parties don't have to be online. Furthermore, there is still a need to contact people you might not know.
For instance, I had to recently contact a prof. at a university. He had no idea who I was, as we had never met or exchanged mail. Sad day for me if the new system only accepts mail from known people.
Think a little.
Unfortunately a products success does not rest solely on the products ability to perform, especially in the IT industry. Windows and IE are not the most used because they are better than the competition. The sucess of webmail services from Yahoo and Microsoft have historically been from their placement in a larger portal system that has nearly endless features and content to attract users. Google does not (yet?) offer instant messaging, gaming, sydicated content (Google News generates no revenue and is aggregation not syndication), career tools, finance tools, caladers, or any of the other thousands of little features Yahoo and MSN offer under a single brand. I believe that they are fighting for different users. Very few Yahoo and Hotmail users will switch over to Gmail, especially since they both have SOME spam blocking and lots more space than before. For most users, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail will continue to be enough for existing users of MSN and Yahoo portals. For those who are in the future attracted to the MSN or Yahoo services, they will continue to sign up for Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail accounts. But, that doesn't mean Gmail won't take off... it just won't take off by taking mass numbers of users away from Yahoo and MSN.
Slashmail.org is an Open Source alternative that has more features and better functionality than the well-known email providers mentioned in this article. Slashmail.org is not free, but intended to compete with these competitors' paid subscriptions. Trial accounts are available for those interested in taking a look at the service. We offer unlimited storage, with both webmail and IMAPS access. We encourage feedback.
Slashmail.org "The Open Source Email Com
I've actually grown to like the gmail advertising model. :)
Half the links they give are adverts, but the lower half are related links. The same links you get if you search for the same keywords.
99% of the time, I find the automatic matches listed there mean I don't have to do a seperate websearch to find out more info.
Its amazing how much more interest you can have in a subject if you can find out extra information about it
I can't be the only person in the world who feels that they are a good thing.
liqbase
There is a way around this, and it's not very intuitive, I'll give you that.
Basically just label an email, then archive it. It wont show up in the inbox, and it only shows up when you click on the label on the left (just like regular folders, but you can have the same email in multiple folders without taking up more space) or click on view all mail. Viola, folders, abeit badly designed and clumbsy, but folders, nontheless.
http://www.fsckin.com/
I look at the beta title a lot like Firefox and Tunderbird. They are both functional programs, but they don't include all of the features and testing required for a full 1.0 release. I used both of them through their "beta" phase and I think gmail is the same sort of thing.
Business model aside, isn't the market pretty well saturated? I have a university address which uses my real name and is my rl address. When I graduate I get a grad address which will probably take on the same functionality. I have a yahoo account which I've held for the last five years with which I sign up to things that I reasonably trust but don't want to use my real name for. In particular I use it for newsletters. Then I have a dozen or so throw away accounts created for just one purpose, or for companies I don't trust at all. I don't *need* another account, and I have no reason to switch. I have a Gmail account, but no use for it. Yes, the searching would be quite nice, and so would decent spam filtering, but it's not enough to sway me off the other two. Most novices online will use their service-provided address. Maybe Gmail will grab their webmail accounts when they spread out, but these are less likely to be primary addresses. Most people who've been around a few months already have plenty of email addresses, and from my experience it takes a heck of a good reason to change.
Half of what you say is right. But:
@gmail.com will not be a mark of the 'elite' for long. GMail is going for the mass market.
And the point is, it's not entirely Google culture -- it's that GMail's business model doesn't require distraction. Their model is based on ads being relevant. If other webmail providers come up with similar relevance technology, they may become as sleek and non-intrusive as GMail.
But you're right -- attitude matters. MS and Yahoo work by traditional techniques, i.e. dangling tasty candy to consumers, in order to deliver eyeballs to corporations. From the era of television.
Google, thankfully, has a different attitude. They're not trying to go against the nature of the web and make it more like TV. They're trying to draw more businesses into the internet way of doing things.
You're so wrong it hurts me!
Computer interfaces don't have to be exact mimics of the real world. They can improve on it too sometimes! If your filing cabinet could hand back the right documents when you just ask for some specific label then you probably would just throw them in the same drawer. Just because your real world filing cabinet can't do this doesn't mean an on-line version of a filing cabinet should have the same limitation.
Being limited to only one 'home' for stuff that could be categorised into many is what's crazy.
> What's with the Google business model anyhow? Do they think they can prosper by having "exclusive" customers?
Your point of view is logical and indeed expectable, but Google successfully exploits one of the most ignored and powerful forms of publicity: the word of mouth. Word of mouth is effective because it is a friend of yours who is advertising the said product, and he's not being paid for it, you believe him because you know that he's telling the truth about his experience, and if the said friend happens to be a computer geek, you believe him twice more, so you better give it a try while you have the chance, otherwise you may lose your exclusive opportunity. If you scrap the first chance and everyone around you joins the "community" you will feel even more tempted to become a part of it.
I had to deal with this issue a year ago when massive amounts of IRC friends joined Orkut and began exchanging contents and speaking through and about it everywhere all the time. My reaction? No I didn't join Orkut, I left IRC! But this only proves how effective Google's publicity model really is. People would never pay as much attention as they do if it was not an "exclusive" service.
The same goes for attachments. Somehow index them and store them seperately.
For example, I was sent an Ashley Simpson 3mb attachment when that first came out, and I noticed 4 others on that message that had gmail accounts. How many other gmail users got that same attachment?
The biggest problem with the Gmail interface is that it uses so much JavaScript; it doesn't run at all on many handheld browsers. I think at least they need a simplified XHTML interface.
The POP feature also makes no sense to me; it basically begs you to download messages from their servers when their stated goal is to collect lots of mail. If they offered IMAP access instead, people could keep their messages on the server. They could even use IMAP for placing subtle adds (e.g., message "1" is always some kind of simple ad, but unlike spam or hotmail, there would always only be one advertising message).
An area where Gmail could really do something better is passwords: they really should offer one-time passwords for travelers. Right now, when traveling, there is a high chance with web-based mail that your password gets compromised.
In any case, for fairly little money, you can get large mailboxes with IMAP interfaces from other companies, and you get a lot more control over them than with Gmail. Currently, Gmail's "free" isn't good enough for me to save the money I get with a commercial provider.
"For all the talk about labels vs. folders, I find labels are counter-intuitive. Here in my filing cabinet I sort documents into folders; I don't stick 3 or 4 different labels on documents and throw them all into the same drawer. It's crazy!"
So, how often do you go to the Xerox machine, make three copies of the original document and file the four copies in four different places? How do you keep track of the fact that you have done this? Do you write on each copy a list of all the other places it's been filed? Do you ever have to make a note on one of these documents and then have to go locate the copies to make the same note? You must have lots of filing cabinets.
The nice thing about labels is that there is only one copy of each document. Evolution handles this also with what I think they call "Virtual Folders". In the real world, of course, you must rely on the Xerox machine and whatever complex scheme you come up with to maintain these copies of things and keep them in synch. This is one of the many things from the real world that need not, and should not be copied to the virtual world. It takes some getting used to, but labels (virtual folders or whatever you want to call them) is a better system. Trust me.
Of course, for people like you who are already USED to some very specific filing system Google could have taken a slightly different approach. I would have (and have suggested) that they allow for "move" and "copy" operations between the labeled groupings. So rather than apply label "friends" to a new message and then Archive it (to remove it from my Inbox), simply "move"ing it to "Friends" would have the same effect. I could also "move" a message from one label category to another in order to remove the old label and attach the new, or "Copy" from one label grouping to another in order to have both labels. The advantage of this paradigm is that it saves a step in most cases. It would also satisfy the needs of some people for the paradigm they are used to. The only "odd" thing about my way of doing it would be the need to warn a user if they were about to delete the last "copy" of a message. Deleting all but the last "copy" of a message would simply be removing extra labels from it, deleting the last copy would be marking it for trash. At no time would there actually be more than one copy of the file though.
I suspect some future versions of file systems will take this approach too, using "links" to store the apparent copies without the user having to do that explicitly. Some extra tools would be required to allow for backups (when you actually want a copy) or clean-ups when you actually want to delete files. File systems that implemented this at a low enough level would save a lot of fragmentation as well, since a lot of files that are opened for update end up never actually getting updated.
"How long ago did they promise 250 MB for each account? And I'm still running on 2 MB? The new credit cards they hand out have almost as much memory as a Hotmail account, which is just sad. But hey, we all knew it was a Microsoft marketing stunt."
:) But I DID finally get my 250meg a few days ago. Something like six months after they convinced all the technical journals to make the claim for them. I'm very disappointed (but not surprised) that so few of the professional publications called them out on this. The Hotmail interface sucks. Yahoo is much better, and Gmail is better still. Ditto for performance.
I agree that it's both a joke and a stunt
I think the biggest impact of Google to both Yahoo and Hotmail is that both services are now having to give away for free service levels that they were previously charging for. My guess is that sign-ups for these extended services are way down, and those who are signing up are doing so because they actually intend to make use of all that extra storage (2-gig for Yahoo for example) and are going to want to be on the phone yelling at someone anytime it's not available. In other words those that do pay for these formerly free services are going to be the squeaky wheel types that will eat up all your proffit margin.
It hasn't been that long (1999 or so) since several companies were offering free online disk storage, online word processing and several other services. The dot-com-bust made them all dry up real fast. I'm glad to see the moneyed players start testing these waters again though since I think the future of computing (especially for the home user) is going to be free or near-free online services rather than having to have an ad-hoc systems administrator in every household in the land. The Microsoft "everything on your desktop" model was moronic from the get-go and it took a "genius" like Bill Gates to actually profit so well from such a bad idea. Now if we could get back to true technology, which was already in progress before the Microsoft interruption.
Many Spamassassin users do not have the mastery of computers that is presumed by the spamassassin principle people. More and better basic users materials without the industry jargon is needed.
For bonus points, describe how you would find that time and date email with a regular email setup.