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3 Email Chiefs Come to Dinner
Carl Bialik writes "The heads of email from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all recently went over to Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes's house for dinner and conversation. Gomes has an interesting writeup of the conversation that transpired. The meal started as a lovefest for Gmail and Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond 'agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail.' But Gomes adds, 'Whatever early lead Gmail may have had in creating a next-generation email program, both Microsoft and Yahoo have more than caught up. I wondered out loud to Mr. Buchheit if Gmail, the pioneer, might now be falling behind. "There is a lot more we want to build," he responded.'"
It started off ok but the punchline could use some work.
The meal started as a lovefest for Gmail and Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond 'agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail.'
Reportedly, soon after, Steve Ballmer threw a chair at Mr. Doerr, who was told that he was going to be "fucking killed."
You can clearly see where that was going, let alone the article. The article was rather interesting to me... I can only picture the rep's from Microsoft and Yahoo eyeing Googles Rep all night long, just waiting for the opportunity to rip him to shreds.
Just me
they met for dinner. they chatted. they smiled, and they hated each other. and? nothing will change. they are just little cranks in big machines. and these machines have their own agendas. whatever. don't you have better news? like michael jackson going broke?
Surprised they didn't yell at each other. Or maybe they did and he left that out of the article.
google.slashdot
I hope they don't mean they have caught up by simply saying, "We have added more free space too!!!"
I still use Yahoo for all of my spam and I love it for that. It hasn't changed much over what it used to be. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I still accidently use shortcuts in Yahoo... that were intended for Gmail.
There are more things I want to see out of Gmail, but I'm just not sure where the "caught up" part comes into play.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
The day I liked using the Gmail interface better then Thunderbird (and of course outlook) was the day I think Gmail won the war of email. If you count all the spiffy Greasemonkey extensions in firefox for Gmail, then you have a really amazing email service.
Meet new people, and kill them.
I wouldn't know anything about MSN e-mail. I wouldn't touch an MSN account with a 10' cat5 cable.
Oh, I almost forgot: YMMV.
Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "what is this, a joke?"
-Lod
Microsoft has promised to fix the spam problem by 2006. That's only ten days away! That's great, my little email server is getting about a thousand spams a day so I'm really looking forward to what they roll out. I'm a little concerned, though, that Microsoft hasn't actually announced anything specific that would fix the problem yet, this close to 2006.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
(no relation to the lattice of carbon atoms)
Micrososft and Yahoo are weak compared to the vision Google has. All they both have done for the last 4 years is play catch up and the copy game. Google should shake these two off their coat tails and continue to be industry leaders. Let microsoft continue to develop their subpar OS and let yahoo do whatever they are supposedly good at. Neither can compete with Google in Google's arena!
where they all started kissing. What a love fest!
No seriously, I think stuff like this is great. developers (despite their corporation's enemies) really can benefit from good conversation with their peers. At this level, its good to see the top three disusing things... even if its surface stuff. That isn't often possible with all the red tape out there.
Kudos to the WSJ for organizing....
The article implies that Microsoft has more than caught up, assuming caught up to google with hotmail.
Maybe I missed it, but Hotmail is still a festering hole of a email service compared to GMail. Its slower, a total spam magnet, and its spam filtering is as useless as a condom with the tip cut off. Oh and the interface hasnt actually changed much. Not to mention GMail keeps piling on the capacity and features.
Caught up? Riiiiiiiiight
Unfortunately, Buchheit kept interrupting to mention advertisers based on what Doerr and Diamond were talking about.
spam egg spam spam bacon and spam
Remember kids, with great power comes great opportunity to abuse that power
It seemed like they all get along very nicely. I agree with the other poster that they are just small cranks in a big machine. I do think that Hotmail and Yahoo revolutionized the world back in the day when they unveiled "FREE EMAIL" for everyone. That was around 1998. Before that, you had to pay. All of a sudden, there was no excuse to not have and use an email address.
Gmail, well.. It's really cool and they were the first major player to give 1GB of space. But still, I don't think Gmail was a real killer when it was introduced. All they really had going for them was the 1GB thing, which all the other competitors quickly matched. It was just Google's first step into the services/portal sector that Yahoo has controlled since the mid 90's. I don't think the release of Gmail was a world-changing development.
Now that I think about it, this article really has no point.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Shouldn't be mad at each other. The Yahooligan knows that Yahoo is still the #1 most visited website, the MS Man knows that his OS owns, and the google guy gloats over Gmail. Heck, Yahoo and MS have been around way longer than google. It's the upstart, even in this field.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
of this slashdot page -
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke"
Gmail is still the only one of the three to still offer free POP3 support. I can use my own favorite client (currently Thunderbird) with gMail. For free.
{ - Generic Guy - }
This article shows that engineers of competing products usually respect each other. All too often this is lost when passionate people discuss why they like/dislike a product.
No, I will not work for your startup
I've been playing with Yahoo! Mail Beta for a couple of weeks now, and as far as the interface goes, I'm not terribly impressed. It is essentially a desktop GUI email client fit into a browser window, and it does that well enough (though a little slow on my Linux and Mac boxes -- and they do warn you things may not be great on those OS's). Nevertheless, it feels to me like yesterday's ideas stuck in a new package.
The great thing about Gmail is its interface innovation. Where Yahoo! Mail has always felt cluttered (and Mail Beta does too), Gmail really gets out of my way so I can just read and send email.
I haven't used Hotmail, but from what I've seen, looking over other people's shoulders, they don't really compete with Gmail either.
Hmm, I am working on a firefox extension,g
Screenshot:
http://img438.imageshack.us/img438/9559/gms7rf.jp
Does anyone know if gmail is planning something like this themselves (skins)?
I was almost expecting him to say that after dinner, he broke out his Martin 12-sting and they all sang Kumbaya.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Gmail's inbox size is still going up. 2GB was the starting size
I just popped over to the gmail page and it says: 2676.615608 megabytes (and counting)
I think Yahoo has done a lot more than MSN to cautch up. MSN is still waaaay behind when it comes to e-mail & Hotmail's layout is teh suxxor
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
My SquirrelMail installation has it all over all three of them!
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
hehe, get accounts on them all... Hell, get multiple accounts on them all...
Deleted
Don't know if the situation has changed, but if you use an alias to send email to your Y! email account, the spam filters silently don't learn.
I trained it with around 1500 messages and still "C*ck crazed sluts" still got through. So after much nagging, I finally got the response that messages that are sent to an aliased name aren't spam filtered.
And how damn hard is it to add a naughty word filter? Seeing they failed me with spam guard, that leaves trying to bumble it with filters. You can only set up a small number of filters, so that's out.
It would be trivial of them to just have a special single filter you could select that would catch the most common spamming words.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds.
Stop looking over my shoulder, and mind your own business! Sincerely, Your cubicle mate.
Dining philosophers.
And what a surprise, a deadlock.
Well, I am happy for them. Somehow, I doubt they eked out the evening on K rations and a quart of cider wiped down with a rag. However, in between congratulating themselves these gentlemen could perhaps have spared a moment for the many millions of folks out there for whom email means not megabucks in the bank and a cushy job but fraud, phishing and asphixiation by spam. The net needs new and improved email protocols, not (yet more) talk-talk from the Porsche-driving classes. Also, this journalist sounds a little too close to his natural prey. Perhaps he laced the after-dinner mints with a power emetic as a gesture, at least, of professional independence. We can only hope.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
AJAX based drag-and-drop email is becoming commonplace now. At this point it's a "must have" feature, and any web based email program that doesn't have it is going to look as if it hasn't been updated since 2004 :)
:)
Yahoo and MSN both have it now. Even the software that drives private email systems has it now. You've probably seen the screenshots for Roundcube, and you've probably seen the screenshots and swf-demos of systems like Citadel and Zimbra.
The point is, Google was the big trailblazer here, but at this point, everyone is now on that trail. The bar has been raised and rich AJAX webmail has quickly gone past "innovative" and is now "an expectation." Meanwhile, Google is probably busy cooking up the Next Big Thing. We hope.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Slightly off topic warning! What do you suppose would happen if Google introduced a corporate server version of Gmail? Would it crush Exchange?
Would be to provide a robust, free, POP accessible mail account. Then I can use whatever damn interface I want.
I admit I havn't really done much research on AJAX yet, but has anyone come out with a BBS system for it similiar to phpBB or vBulletin?
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
then the dinner was ruined when 100s of door-to-door salespeople showed up selling ViaGra, Debt relief, and offers to enlarge their members.
Only thing gmail has going for it is conversation threading. I still prefer Outlook web access... right click menu interfaces (why hasnt gmail tried this yet?), no breaking the back button (occasionally it doesnt work with firefox in gmail... they say they don't but they do) advanced rule sets and scripting.
-everphilski-
Who else read the title as "3 Email Chefs Come to Dinner"?
I had a picture in my mind of Iron Chef.
Today's ingredient is... (drum roll)
SPAM!!
(A can of Spam is unveiled amid lights, smoke, and dramatic music.)
Yahoo mail predated Google mail.
Even though I use and love gmail for my private email and dabbled with the new and improved Yahoo mail, I still can't see using either for my work email.
...(Yes, I know what I am doing and haven't gotten a virus that way for the last 15 years)
-No on the fly spell checking (I fell to my knees and gave thanks to the lizzard when the Thunderbird 1.5 beta came out)
-No filters and user defined folders on Gmail. Searching it fine, but seeing which emails come from developers for 15 different projects, product managers, business partners, or DQA at one glance is essential for me.
-I want to be able to double click attachments without having to go through right-click, dialog box,
-I send and get a few hundred non-spam emails every day. The 50 conversations per page simply doesn't cut it.
-A comment on Yahoo's "see all the messages in your inbox on one screen": I move every email out of the inbox either through filters, or once I read them, one of my colleagues has about 90,000 in hers. So that doesn't work for either of us.
-Having multiple messages in differnt threads open is a pain. Even when using tabs.
-I like to have local copies of my mail. On the one hand, it lets me find stuff when the T3 or out DNS server is down, and I can mine them using other programs or even write some quick code to do it.
I love the clean interface on Gmail and their grouping by conversations and they way they display them is brilliant, though. No matter what the three guys and the journalist say. For long threads, it is faster for me than the threaded modes in desktop programs.
...what was served for dinner?
Informatus Technologicus
You tell users to start using something "better" than outlook, and see how far you get.
Gmail complains about Opera but lets me use it, and I found no incompatibilities. Yahoo Mail Beta won't let me log in with Opera, so I'm still on the old, HTML-based system.
I'm still using mainly Yahoo, though. I love their spam filter, which catches all but 1 of the 60+ spams I get per day, and only flags 1 or 2 false positives per month.
I've played aroung with Gmail, but didn't see anything worth the trouble of changing my official email address. I'va also played around with Yahoo mail v2 via Firefox. Apart from the fact that I prefer Opera and think it's a waste to run 2 browsers, and didn't really see any reason to drop yahoo mail v1 either. The new interface is very outlook express-like, but for me it doesn't really work any better than the old one.
I'm wondering if I'm missing something here, since I like Yahoo's original, several years old interface, as much if not more the the new and imporved interfaces of Gmail and Yahoo v2. As long as I have good spam filters and nicknames, I'm happy.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
You do realize that Gmail was one of the pioneering web applications of the recent AJAX movement, right? Id say it was one of the first "rich AJAX webmail" client.
That's beside my point, though. MS was using AJAX years and years ago in their web Outlook application (that had drag and drop!) and nobody really took much notice. Because it was slow, bloated and not real user friendly. Replicating a desktop environment on the web isn't automatically innovative and technology isn't quite at the point where doig so lends itself to a superior user experience. To each there own, etc., but I have yet to hear a convincing argument against Gmail and for its competitors, namely MS and Yahoo.
I went to an interesting discussion as part of Mobile Monday a few months ago where both Google and Yahoo were together on a panel. While they were cordial as it appears they were in this conversation, it was clear that they were uncomfortable making any announcements lest the competition one-up them with a bigger announcement. In fact, I think I even saw some sideways glances. =)
The web portal competition strikes me a bit like the space race of the 1960s where everyone knows the goal but they aren't quite sure what the competition is up to. I can imagine that leads to a fair bit of paranoia.
http://www.flurry.com
E-mail and news on y
Trust me, Gmail's guy is set for life too. Have you seen Google's stock price yet?
It's only a paper profit at this point, unless he actually sold some of his shares.I don't have much need for free email, but I do have a gmail account. The one thing I hate is no folders. I also was looking at picasa for photo management for my wife. Again not very folder friendly. Tags maybe the trendy thing, but I like physical organization.
I appreciate Google letting you use pop3 to download your email and letting you change the reply to address. Having used both squirrelmail on my own server, gmail and the Zimbra demo server, web mail, ajax or straight seems destined to be slow and clunky.
One feature I need in GMail is this (and I hope someone from Google is reading). I want to have several mailboxes under the same signin name. In other words, I want bar@gmail.com and quux@gmail.com both show up when I login as foo@gmail.com. If they share the same storage quota, I don't care. What I do care about is that emails are in the same mailbox, and when I reply, the reply comes from bar@gmail.com or quux@gmail.com correspondingly. I'd use one address for people who I trust, and another for people who I don't trust with a different set of filters for each group.
This one feature would allow me to abandon native email clients for good (aside from firing them up do back up my email from time to time).
I have both Yahoo and Gmail accounts. There are two reasons that I forward Gmail to Yahoo and read/reply via Yahoo:
1. Yahoo allows access to other (non-Yahoo) POP3 accounts.
2. Yahoo's WAP access makes email (and, thanks to item #1, *all* my email)
available through a WAP portal that works with my carrier (probably any
carrier) and my cell phone (and since it's 3 years old- probably any cell
phone.)
Even though Gmail has rolled out a recent WAP portal, it doesn't work via my carrier and on my cell phone. And they don't allow access of other POP3 accounts.
OTOH- if a big old fat PC is available to access email, I do like the Gmail spiffy stuff.
But- isn't the PC kind of, er- overkill for email?
Is that what 'you' do in the city ?
My dinner is with my family & friends.
Lunch may be with a client.
Brown is a color, not a skin.
The coolest new thing i've seen in Gmail is their implementation of AJAX in the autocompletion of address book names and other goodies in the system. Makes for easier emailing.
Does Yahoo Mail and MSN Mail work on all the browsers in the world? That may be a reason why Google Mail may be holding out. I am taking a wild-assed guess.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
The meal started as a lovefest for Gmail and Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond 'agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail.'
It sounds like somebody hired a GNAA troll to write this article, but thank god it didn't end up with Kevin Doerr "doerring" Paul.
-- n
Thing is, I don't want this to be easy to defeat. Someone with a perl script could just strip the stuff after "+" and go directly to my mailbox. Then there's also a risk that someone may want to use a funky email client which has no clue that "+" in the email address is a valid character.
What's funny is how the reps from Yahoo and Hotmail ribbed Google for its "beta" status, but when you think about it... that's truly one of GMail's best features.
Think about it, GMail users--how much trouble was it to get a username you LIKED? In fact, even to this day, there are still a lot of usernames that aren't duped or that require adding a stupid numeral suffix like 666. All because spammers and hordes of username thieves didn't jump on board--hell, they couldn't. I say, stay in "invite-only" beta as long as you want. It's not hard at all to get an invite if you want one, and it keeps the riffraff out.
I wonder if the dinner ended with a touching monologue by Spencer Tracy about the subtle complexities of facing one's racist upbringing, as a teary-eyed Katherin Hepburn glazed over in the background...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
it is garbage!
How about the next big thing being to return support for accessibility and the "back" button to all those sites where they both worked before going AJAX? Wouldn't that be something?
Free Hans!
after dinner they all got out their wangs to see who had the biggest one. Yahoo and Hotmail were suffering shrinkage, but Gmails was a long and thick beast, with a large knobend.
They then had lightsaber battles, after which Hotmail went to ground and Gmail stuffed his big beef in Hotmail's ass, while Yahoo spanked off whilst watching. Yahoo then proceeded to put his dong in Gmail's mouth.
Holy.fucking.shit. eMail. It's like mail but it's electronic and shit and brings you a zillion times more useless shit than regular mail.
As I said. Holy muthafucking celestial shit. eMail. They should erect a 1000 foot tall gold statue to these guys.
Ok we can all give up and stop all human progress. eMail is here. Which is better than God.
Wow I am blown away. e fucking mail.
Another great extension is GSpace, which lets you use your Gmail account as web storage. Very useful.
What originally attracted me to GMail was the account size. 1GB of mail, for me, may as well be an infinite amount. The (what was it, 5mb?) limit of my hotmail account was far too constraining.
Now that size is no longer an issue on either of them, I find myself still prefering hotmail. For one, the interface is way better. I dont *like* having a huge Inbox view, and you can't even change the default view (to, say, remove mail with filters).
My MAJOR peeve with gmail, however, lies with how you send mail. First, I dont actually need it to remember the address of EVERY PERSON who has ever sent or been sent email. Second, it takes twenty times longer than just using the 'listing' interface Hotmail has used for years. As it is now, I have to hit A, and pick anyone matching, then hit B, and pick anyone matching, and so on. Annoying? Hell ya.
One thing which annoys me about Hotmail, and it's a small thing, is that they have 'dumbed down' the possible filtering you can do. They used to offer far more options for how to sort, and actions to take. For example, I used to be able to take email from a certain recipient, then check if the subject had "FW:" in it, and 'file' it to deleted items. Now I can only choose one operative function.
Gmail made a splash not because of the feature set but because they offered 1gb of free space.
Their mail interface is very unorthodox and while some people like it, I think it sucks personally. In either case, Google mail hasn't really changed at all since it debuted. It's stagnant. I guess they think 1.0 is the be all and end all of email? Survey says...? Bzzzzzt!
Yahoo's mail interface is... ok. They certainly haven't "caught up with Google." It's just pretty much the same old thing with more space. Yahoo is doing some work on an improved interface, but it's not a leaps and bounds thing. But at least there's some decent work going on.
And Microsoft? Well, hotmail is the same as ever, the worst in the business. Now that spammers can pay to not get filtered out, you get more spam than ever in your inbox. There is NO innovation at all happening there.
What would be awesome if they could make an email thing where AJAX complemented the browsing experience instead of getting in the way.
What's the big deal with skins as a "feature"? I'll grant you that there are those that actually improve on the usability, but it's a tiny fraction.
Mostly I see skins that change the colors to match the creators favorite sports team or feature the face of Britney or whoever.
ugh.
Gmail has labels instead of folders. So I can categorize my email in many different iterations, and look at whatever slice of it I like. As far as I'm aware, Yahoo and Hotmail (and every other mail client) still only let you put an email in one folder. Sure, there's Lookout for Outlook, which is nice, but it's a slap-on fix. Gmail's design goes for the root cause.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Buchheit: I gotta go to the bathroom. Is that alright? ...
Balmer: When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.
Diamond:
Balmer: It's ok, I frisked him.
Diamond: Just don't take too long.
MS has demonstrated one of the best web clients for years; it comes with Exchange and is called outlook web access.
OWA is simply a framed Web site styled to look like its application big brother...the rendering to HTML still occurs completely at the server end. I've been using OWA for almost 6 years now and I think even 2003 is lacking compared to Gmail...it is noticably slower and the main frame must completely reload to do almost anything. One of the big advantages of Gmail is how quickly it responds to any action. In addition the OWA GUI is not nearly as clean and simple--too many unlabeled icons and cluttered layout. Yes, design matters.
What stops them from going public as quickly as google upgrades is that while google has a few million subscribers the other two have 10 of millions. It's a bit different when you deal with grown up numbers.
There is no fundamental difference between a "few" million and "10s of" million users. The barrier MS and Yahoo face is that their systems are already in use and have already been through numerous updates, patches, and bug fixes. It's a legacy problem, not a scale problem. Google's biggest advantage is that their system was built "modern" from the start. As their user numbers grow and technology advances, they will at some point undoubtedly face problems similar to what MS and Yahoo face now.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond walk into a bar.
Google's Paul Buchheit ducks.
How about just coding to standards? Why is that so hard to get? I use a Web browser (Opera) which conforms to those same standards in what it will accept and how it renders; all you (email chiefs/chefs) need to do is send me standards-compliant data. I'll take it from there. Leave the proprietary browser-specific workaround crap back in 1999 where it belongs.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Google didn't mention that MSN & Yahoo's email filters do Evil and block by default far too many domains. They have a geographical prejudice against asia that means a new server in Hong Kong will be guaranteed to have all new email in the junk/spam/bulk folder.
:(
So if I have a server in Hong Kong and I don't send enough email to warrant their whitelisting service I would have to setup a server in the US or use a free email provider
From what i see, 90% of yahoo accounts are robots, or fakers or dupes, or dead accounts.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Way to contradick ;-) yourself. First you say it doesn't matter how many users Google has, then you say once Google has as many users as MS and Yahoo they'll have the same problems.
So which is it?
Google is quite smart to maintain itself as invite only. This keeps the userbase growing, but slow enough that it can manage.
It's not how many users they have, it's that they have users at all. Google is still effectively on version 1 of Gmail. They did not have a webmail system until they built Gmail as an "AJAX" app from scratch.
MS and Yahoo are on like version 5 or 7.7 or whatever. They have to replace a system with an AJAX version, not just introduce an AJAX version from scratch.
It's like the difference between upgrading the computer system of an airplane while it's flying through the air, versus building a new airplane in a hangar on the ground. It doesn't really matter how big the airplane is or how many passengers there are--what makes it hard is whether it's currently flying or not.
Google built Gmail "in the hangar" but now it has taken off. Now, at some point they'll be faced with the prospect of a massive upgrade in the air.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.