Slashdot Mirror
The Downide of Your ISP Turning to Gmail
SlinkySausage writes "Google is offering ISPs the opportunity to turn over their entire email operation to Google, with all customer email hosted as Gmail accounts. This would allow Google to grow its user base rapidly (Google is a distant third with 51M users compared to Yahoo's 250M and Hotmail's 228M). There are some obvious benefits to end users — Google is offering ISPs mailboxes of up to 10GB per user. APCMag.com has posted an interesting piece looking at the dark side of Google's offer. Not least is in its reinforcing of the attachment people have to their ISP's email address, making it harder to change ISPs if a better deal comes along."
Dont shash eeditors use Forefox? its gut a bilt in spellchcker..
MABASPLOOM!
As opposed to it being so much easier to change your ISP email if it's hosted with your ISP?
:-)
That comment doesn't make any sense.
Just so you know, the latest versions of Firefox have spell-checking built in
I have multiple accounts on Yahoo I don't use anymore because Gmail is so much better, but which I keep around incase there are accounts I signed up for that I forgot to transfer over.
And how strong is Yahoo's protection against fake accounts these days?
And
I don't see what the difference would be. Whether your email is hosted by your ISP or by Google for your ISP. It's the same account name.
If anything was a problem it would be whether Google would "index" your email so it could target ads at you.
"People will have to switch email addresses" Mother of god, someone stop this company. They will be the end of us all.
The obvious downside is that Microsoft/MSN would lose customers... What, nobody noticed that the article is one ninemsn (Australia's MSN website)? This website has been known to have one-sided (Microsoft's side) stories and "news".
I bought my own domain some time ago. Its a small price to pay for an email address that never changes and you can carry through physical and ISP moves. I haven't figured out what to do with the website (aside from important document backups which are not search engine indexed) but the email service has been great. I do use the catchall service to try to track which companies sell my email address. So far I haven't caught anybody doing anything sneaky, although Prosound Stage and Lighting refuses to take me off their list (don't buy anything from them, you'll never get off the list)
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
recursion and lawyers?
two things that should not be in the same phrase...
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
That depends. Does the universe kill all the lawyer processes when it runs out of memory?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If the ISP had IMAP support, that'd be a downside right there, since Gmail still doesn't!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Since so few people seem to be RTFA...
1. Google announces that ISP's will be able to release a google-apps branded for their users. This includes domain management, docs, spreadsheets, calendar, web page creator, gmail, and 24 hour phone support.
2. MSN Austrailia points out that the ISP's will have to pay for the service. MSN Austrailia also points out that Google will tie users to their ISP account / domain instead of a more generic Google account. And they point out that Google's smallest ISP size bracket, 0 - 200,000 users, covers nearly all of the ISPs in Austrailia.
MSN Austrailia also takes pains to poke jabs at competing ISP's, specifically leaves out information, and otherwise sounds a lot like FUD.
The ______ Agenda
That depends. Does the universe kill all the lawyer processes when it runs out of memory?
No, the lawyer processes just terminate automatically when the universe runs out of money.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
- They already host all websites (Google Cache). Since they already got storage, check-out, advertising, a HTML-editor(they might need an extra acquisition to really pursue this successfully), statistics and forms (Google grid), it is a small step for them to offer free hosting with all the tools you need. So the costs remain the same but the income doubles
- Offering free hosting will offer Google huge cost savings in processor-capacity and bandwidth. That is because they don't have to crawl sites anymore, because they already got them! This will save them exactly 25 times the size of a site, per site in terms of bandwith.
- They can even better trace users and thus increase advertising accuracy and income.
- Google does not only want to control Awareness and Interest of end-users, but also Trial and Adoption, so they can make money on purchases as well (Google check-out), not only advertising.
- Huge investments in storage, capacity and double-click are enabling them to do so
- Offering end-users bandwidth and connectivity, will dramatically increase Google's' ability to track behavior and allows them to be even more efficient
- Being better in advertising and having more economies of scale allows Google to compete successfully with the ISP's
So their actions over the last few years are completely logical from this perspective. From an ISP's perspective and an end-user perspective they are (or should) be terrifying.