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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."
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?
Why do I use webmail:
a) I can access it anywhere.
b) It's free.
c) It doesn't change when I change ISP.
d) It's backed-up properly by a commercial vendor, which is better than I can offer myself.
e) Spam filtering is generally great.
f) POP3 boxes are usually 30mb, which will fill in a week. Gmail is 1gig, that'll fill in a year.
Personally, I use addresses at my own domain, and just foward the whole lot to gmail. Works a treat, and if gmail fails I'll just forward to my POP3 box again..
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
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.