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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.'"
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
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
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!
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.
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.
My SquirrelMail installation has it all over all three of them!
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
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.
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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.
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/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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.
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.
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