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The Downide of Your ISP Turning to Gmail

Posted by kdawson on from the Google-Apps-Partner-Edition dept.

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."

14 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. What's a 'Downide'? by neoform · · Score: 5, Funny

    Dont shash eeditors use Forefox? its gut a bilt in spellchcker..

    --
    MABASPLOOM!
    1. Re:What's a 'Downide'? by Joey+Patterson · · Score: 5, Funny

      I have a spelling checker,
      It came with my PC;
      It plainly marks four my revue
      Mistakes I cannot sea.
      I've run this poem threw it,
      I'm sure you're please too no,
      It's letter perfect in it's weight,
      My checker tolled me sew.

      -Author Unknown-

    2. Re:What's a 'Downide'? by sheriff_cahill · · Score: 5, Funny

      Why bother with spell checkers? They should just switch double the killer delete select all

    3. Re:What's a 'Downide'? by risk+one · · Score: 5, Funny

      This is Slashdot. A spell checker is redundant and not needed.
      And it's clear that you can't stand redundancy, right?
    4. Re:What's a 'Downide'? by simon_clarkstone · · Score: 5, Informative

      I have a spelling checker,
      It came with my PC;
      It plainly marks four my revue
      Mistakes I cannot sea.
      I've run this poem threw it,
      I'm sure you're please too no,
      It's letter perfect in it's weight,
      My checker tolled me sew.

      -Author Unknown- Actually, Author Known. It was written (slightly differently) by John Brophy as a humour piece in the June 1996 edition of the Farm Journalist, newsletter of the Canadian Farm Writers' Federation. The edition used to be online at http://www.cfwf.ca/farmj/fjjun96/#spell, and is still present in the Web Archive:

      http://web.archive.org/web/20050116015142/http://w ww.cfwf.ca/farmj/fjjun96/#spell

      (Finally, after keeping that information for several years, it has become useful, and my struggle has not been in vain!!!)
      --

      C:\>spell -b slashdot_submission.txt
      Bad command or file name.
  2. Eh? by fabs64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 :-)

    1. Re:Eh? by Lars512 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The "dark side" does seem to be not very well thought through. Basically, it argues that by giving them a much better email service (for webmail at least), customers might become more attached to their isp-specific email address. So it's actually arguing for worse ISP service, so that nobody will accept it and everyone will choose some more "liberating" mail provider. Give me a break. Better service is better service. It's your own problem if your ISP ties you in this way (they all do), and at least here there's the chance for an easy migration to a generic Gmail account if Google pursues this strategy. Customers didn't even have that chance before.

  3. I don't understand the problem. by khasim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    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.
  4. The obvious downside... by teh+moges · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

    1. Re:The obvious downside... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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"."

      people probably didn't notice it was ninemsn because it ISN'T a ninemsn article. It is an APC article, APC are anything but Microsoft friendly, they even regularly ship linux distros on there included DVD/CD they ship with the magazine.

  5. Re:Thin end of the wedge by WannaBeGeekGirl · · Score: 5, Funny

    And what happens when Google rolls out services competing directly with ISPs?
    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
  6. IMAP!!! by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  7. Re:Thin end of the wedge by User+956 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  8. Google is your next ISP! by antikronos · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Google offering email to ISP's does not surprise me. Google is investing the majority of their advertising profits into bandwidth and storage. There are a range of reasons why it is a logical next step for Google to become your next ISP:
    • 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.