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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
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)
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
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
You are way off man. MS has demonstrated one of the best web clients for years; it comes with Exchange and is called outlook web access.
... they may be in respects to the media coverage, but certainly not with the numbers.
That said, MS and Yahoo both have public beta testing for web clients that are far superior to what google has now. Check them out if you don't believe me. 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.
Google might have something in the works, but there isn't much buzz in or out of the google campus about it. And as long as their core number of users is small they won't be a real player
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.
Dining philosophers.
And what a surprise, a deadlock.
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!
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.)
Do you work for UPS or something?
Actually, this is already possible. Any email that is of the form myname+stuff@gmail.com will go to myname@gmail.com. So, you can use myname+spam@gmail.com for all your untrusted sources, and just myname@gmail.com for everything else. Then, filter on the To: line and apply appropriate labels, and voila! Problem solved.
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.