Giving credit where credit is due, they may not have invented some of these markets, but they did re-invent them. GMail was definitely pioneering, both with its use of AJAX for the UI and offering 1 GB of storage at a time when Hotmail and Yahoo were offering 2 and 6 mb, respectively. Do you think either of those companies would have bumped their own storage offerings and come up with their own modern interfaces if not for Google?
Same thing with maps. Google introduced the draggable map and satellite imagery overlays, and again we see the market leaders moving to catch up.
Google doesn't necessarily get into markets first, but they do have a propensity for disrupting them via real innovation. Few other companies can claim to do that.
I'm the same way (car idiot), but I do believe that most used cars these days, if you buy em from the dealer, come with the same warranty as a new car (3 year/36,000 mile), though it might depend a bit on the dealer. Some will even put on new brakes and tires before re-selling it. At least that's what mine came with, and having that certainly lowers the risk of getting hit with a big bill from owning the car.
Huh? First of all dealers love financing, because to them interest is just free money. They make a lot less off people who pay in cash.
Paying any interest at all on a car is f*cking stupid, because unlike a house a car depreciates in value. Cars aren't an investment.
If you take out a loan for a car (or lease one), not only will you spend $20,000 on a car you'll only get to re-sell for less than half that in a few years time, you'll be paying the dealer an *extra* few grand in interest... for what, exactly? And don't believe 0% interest rates. They always screw you in the fine print.
If you want to get even smarter, you'd always buy used cars that are 3-4 years old. By then they've already lost most of their value and you can re-sell it down the road for much closer to what you paid for it.
It's simple supply and demand. Right now there's only 400k of them in the country, much much fewer than rabid Sony fanboys and hardcore gamers. That drives the price up (in an open market such as ebay, anyway).
Once Sony gets the production issues worked out, the supply/demand won't be in their favor anymore - supply will go up and demand will go down as the fanboys get their console. Once it gets to the point that anyone who wants a PS3 can get one at retail, then we'll find out if the $600 is above what the market will bear.
And we won't even know that for several years. Console price drops are just a form of market segmentation. Sony will sell every PS3 it can to the people who are willing to shell out $600 for it, then drop the price and sell it to everyone willing to pay at that level, then do it again, and again, and again, etc.
There's other factors involved besides price, like the size and quality of the game library at a given point in time, and the age of the console... but what you might find is that there's a big spike in sales when the console finally hits that "sweet spot", which my guess is around $300, the same price range that most every successful console launches at.
No, my point was simply that some people (George Lucas especially) do make a buttload of money from copyrights older than 15 years. I was only contesting your point that it "wouldn't really shock anyone's system", as you put it.
Yet see Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios for a case in which substantial copying -- entire programs for private viewing -- was upheld as fair use.
Making full copies for the purpose of time shifting, format shifting, and backup for personal non-commercial use is regarded as fair use under the Sony Betamax case law. Hence the legality of VCR's and Tivo. Various DRM schemes seek to make this impossible, and the DMCA makes exercising these rights illegal even where tools exist to do it.
Further, DRM also prevents fair use with regards to quoting and excerpting, regardless of the purpose. I can't clip a scene from a movie purchased from iTunes for the purpose of reviewing it on my blog, for example. At least not without first breaking the DRM.
For the record, I don't buy DRMed media. But my unwillingness has absolutely nothing to do with a desire to get it for free or share it on P2P networks.
There's a big difference between the market's inevitable adoption of Vista and the market's adoption of the DRM laden media-playback features of Vista.
It's rather telling, IMHO, that the iPod, iTunes software, Zune, Windows Media Player, and every "PlaysForSure" player out there continue to support playback of mp3's. Despite all the "success" of Apple's iTunes, I note that it hasn't exactly started a mass migration away from the mp3 format. At something like 4 iTMS tracks sold per iPod, something tells me people aren't filling up their players via that route.
I think that if Apple turned off mp3 support for the iPod and insisted it *only* play DRM-protected tracks from the iTMS, the iPod's marketshare would drop to nothing overnight. And while some small percentage of people might go for whatever music store Microsoft puts on the Vista desktop, I similarly suspect it won't displace the un-DRMed mp3 anytime soon, nor will Microsoft prevent the playback of un-DRMed music.
I'm not sure past performance is a predictor of future results. There have most certainly been societies that wiped themselves out before. The key difference is that these were all isolated - when you have a hundred different independent civilizations, some can fall while the others continue to rise.
For all intents and purposes, the human race is one single civilization now, with more interdependencies between opposite ends of the globe than anyone can possibly be aware of. We also, for the first time in history (meaning in the last fifty years or so) have the capacity to affect globe-spanning changes. If our society dies out, we may very well take the human race with us.
The best example of this is with Windows itself. Let's say you're and entrepreneur starting a business. At the beginning, you have no income and very little cash on hand - you're going to minimize expenditures as much as is humanly possible.
So are you going to start off paying hundreds of dollars for each Windows and Office license? Heck no. Odds are, you're going to start with pirated copies. As the business grows and you can afford it, you'll start to worry about license compliance, buy legitimate copies and send thousands of dollars to Microsoft.
But let's pretend for a second that piracy wasn't an option, that Microsoft actually manages to come up with perfect DRM for it's software. Is that same entrepreneur going to pay the license fees Windows in the beginning? Heck no. In that situation, he'd probably figure out a way to make his shop run on Linux instead. And as the business grows and he gets to the point he can afford licenses... he'll still be running on Linux.
That's how piracy helps the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, and some of these other software shops - "free" pirated versions help establish their software as "the standard". If they manage to lock out of the market all these people who couldn't afford to pay for it - small shops, college students, amateur enthusiasts, etc. - they'd lose their lock on the market.
It used to be that when a friend needed an OS I'd give them a copy of XP (since inevitably they lost the restore CD's that came with their Dell or whatnot). Microsoft's anti-piracy measures with Vista are such that I'm starting to hand out Ubuntu CD's instead. Non-techies barely notice the difference once I've gotten their email working. But I'm sure Microsoft will start to feel the impact of that if enough users make the same decision.
While I understand these complaints (sort of), they always struck me as unfounded. As far as connectivity goes - I've had hard disks fail more times in the last year than my net connection has. If we're not yet in the age of ubiquitous internet connectivity, we will be pretty shortly.
I think for the average user, web based applications are an ideal solution. Most of the "advantages" of the personal computer have been a disaster for the average joe - it puts them in the pilot's seat when the best place for him is really back in the passenger area. Here's how I see it, with Gmail as the example:
- Google uses redundant storage and backip schemes. Any email sitting locally on the average joe's computer likely isn't. - He doesn't need to install the application, just point to a web site. - Upgrades are automatic, there's nothing for him to maintain. - Google removes viruses, he's not dependent on keeping his symantec/mcafee subscription up to date and making sure all the software is working as it should. - He can't crash or break the application.
Then there's the features desktop software can't match, like universal accessibility, synchronization across PC's, collaboration and sharing abilities (not so much with email but with other applications). For enterprises, it makes a lot more sense to use a bunch of dumb terminals and keeping all the application logic and data where it can be centrally managed.
Well, the topic is primarily on Google's non-search products - where the need to be number one is much less clear. Like I can't believe that there's not room for both Gmail and Yahoo Mail to co-exist, and both to be profitable for their owners. They're different products that serve different types of customers.
And there's no reason the same thing can't eventually happen with "search". The problem now is that there's very little differentiation in search - but there's no real reason that will always be so. There may emerge competitors who are "significantly better" than Google, but the questions that follow are "Better at finding what? And for whom?". It may wind up that there will be a better search engine for my grandparents to use than the one I'd use for myself, or smaller players focusing on a single vertical that can be superior to Google (Like Technorati, for instance).
News of the purchase came as positive news to Wall Street, while reaction across the tech industry was more varied. Steve Ballmer was quoted saying "I'm going to f*cking kill Mars", and attempted to destroy the planet by throwing a chair at it.
Well, they integrated RSS a whole lot better (I love being able to set my default RSS reader). The spellchecker is pretty sweet and works a lot better than the extensions that previously tried to provide the same functionality (at least in my experience). Session restore and the tab handling are nice as well. Plus there's the speed and memory improvements.
Though in general, I agree, their versions seem off - the 1.5 release always baffled me a bit, and if my understanding is correct they plan for the 3.0 release barely a few months from now in early 07.
In the end though, I choose to look at it this way: The betas were actually betas, and the release candidates were actually release candidates, which is more than you can say for some companies *cough*Google*cough*Microsoft*cough* that treat them as marketing terms.
I read this and immediately thought "Google Book Search".
And on that note, I think the response to the GP and GGP is to let Google handle it. Their whole business would fall apart and the internet itself would come crashing down if current copyright law were strictly enforced online. Their cash cow absolutely depends on being able to access and index the long tail of content, and as such they seem to be making a deliberate effort to re-define or at least expand fair use rights, and maybe even do something about the orphan works problem.
They have a vested interest in copyright reform and a war chest of billions of dollars to make it happen. Wikimedia's resources would be better spent elsewhere.
As other respondents pointed out, it already exists:)
But there's a kernel of a good idea here - take the current dictionary model and expand it into a textbook for learning other languages. The wiki model could work well here as native speakers could translate idiomatic phrases and develop the initial lessons of sentence structure.
If I had Del.icio.us, I'm not sure I'd even bother to try to monetize the service itself. The data it generates is way more valuable than any ads thrown against it. If Yahoo integrated that data (and the data from MyWeb) into their search engine, it'd give them a way to differentiate from Google and maybe even draw users away from them. Right now, search algorithms still work by ranking primarily by inbound links. Del.icio.us gives at least two more solid data points to use - the keywords that *users* associate with pages and the number of *users* who found that page useful enough to save. If they rolled out a few more features, like "search only the pages/sites I've saved/tagged with X" - they could easily give Google a run for their money, bump up their search market share and reap the financial rewards of that.
Yahoo's social properties give them a huge advantage over Google if they chose to leverage them for something other than advertising. Integrating that social data into search could give them a pretty big edge that Google can't easily match.
One more thought (since I hit submit too soon in the last reply): I think you're right that it'll be a "paradigm shift", but not to cell phones. (Cell phones are already here after all, that's not much of a shift).
Something in the Zune's marketing rung true to me, even though it's laughable to say it about the Zune at this point. But what's ultimately going to take down the iPod (at least in its current form) will be a "portable MySpace".
In the next couple of years we'll start to see some major metro areas finally deploy blanket wi-fi coverage, and ubiquitous internet connectivity will become a reality is some major markets. This makes possible all sorts of applications we can barely imagine today. But just for a start imagine a portable device that's truly "social" in that it can maintain a friend's list and report their status and what you're friends are listening to. Let you VOIP to them. Let you post to your MySpace page with pictures and video. Download and watch videos from YouTube. In other words, a device that's fully webified, and bypasses the mobile phone carriers that would charge you an arm and a leg for every byte you download.
The biggest barrier to an mp3 playing phone isn't a technological one, it's the mobile phone carriers. They're all chomping their bits at the idea of a music player phone - but they want to make sure you can only buy music from them, at an exorbitant price, with no way to move the tracks off the phone (forcing you to buy again if you lose or replace the phone). In short, they're greedy SOB's that can't see past the ends of their noses, so a viable mp3 phone is going to be a long time coming.
I don't know about you, but the whole reason I put stuff on my blog is to generate discussion. I rarely get contacted by anyone, but I can't imagine being annoyed if the subject of my posts took the time to respond to them.
Please. We all know that we'd only have to send Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith after them armed with a Macintosh computer. My only worry would be if the aliens have upgraded to the Intel Macs yet, thus ensuring that the virus would be compatible.
Well that's the thing - some people do want to use Outlook, mostly because it's what they're used to. That's the audience Yahoo is going for.
Google's customer base (for products other than their basic search) seems to be a lot geekier than Yahoo's. So whereas the Slashdot crowd is likely to appreciate the way Gmail works, Yahoo's customers are less technically inclined and would value familiarity above all.
The problem with the Slashdot crowd's thinking (and most tech bloggers for that matter) is they imagine that there's one giant market for webmail, and Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail are going head-to-head. But that's not how Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are thinking about it. They see it in terms of geek webmail users, power users, casual users, internet-savvy users, technophobic users, etc. Then they sit and ask themselves which segments they stand the best chance of capturing, and build a product tailored for those markets.
(Personally, I love Gmail - it actually got me away from using Thunderbird as my mail client because I like the webmail UI so much. But I'm a geek.)
Slashdot Mirror
Giving credit where credit is due, they may not have invented some of these markets, but they did re-invent them. GMail was definitely pioneering, both with its use of AJAX for the UI and offering 1 GB of storage at a time when Hotmail and Yahoo were offering 2 and 6 mb, respectively. Do you think either of those companies would have bumped their own storage offerings and come up with their own modern interfaces if not for Google?
Same thing with maps. Google introduced the draggable map and satellite imagery overlays, and again we see the market leaders moving to catch up.
Google doesn't necessarily get into markets first, but they do have a propensity for disrupting them via real innovation. Few other companies can claim to do that.
I'm the same way (car idiot), but I do believe that most used cars these days, if you buy em from the dealer, come with the same warranty as a new car (3 year/36,000 mile), though it might depend a bit on the dealer. Some will even put on new brakes and tires before re-selling it. At least that's what mine came with, and having that certainly lowers the risk of getting hit with a big bill from owning the car.
Huh? First of all dealers love financing, because to them interest is just free money. They make a lot less off people who pay in cash.
Paying any interest at all on a car is f*cking stupid, because unlike a house a car depreciates in value. Cars aren't an investment.
If you take out a loan for a car (or lease one), not only will you spend $20,000 on a car you'll only get to re-sell for less than half that in a few years time, you'll be paying the dealer an *extra* few grand in interest... for what, exactly? And don't believe 0% interest rates. They always screw you in the fine print.
If you want to get even smarter, you'd always buy used cars that are 3-4 years old. By then they've already lost most of their value and you can re-sell it down the road for much closer to what you paid for it.
It's simple supply and demand. Right now there's only 400k of them in the country, much much fewer than rabid Sony fanboys and hardcore gamers. That drives the price up (in an open market such as ebay, anyway).
Once Sony gets the production issues worked out, the supply/demand won't be in their favor anymore - supply will go up and demand will go down as the fanboys get their console. Once it gets to the point that anyone who wants a PS3 can get one at retail, then we'll find out if the $600 is above what the market will bear.
And we won't even know that for several years. Console price drops are just a form of market segmentation. Sony will sell every PS3 it can to the people who are willing to shell out $600 for it, then drop the price and sell it to everyone willing to pay at that level, then do it again, and again, and again, etc.
There's other factors involved besides price, like the size and quality of the game library at a given point in time, and the age of the console... but what you might find is that there's a big spike in sales when the console finally hits that "sweet spot", which my guess is around $300, the same price range that most every successful console launches at.
No, my point was simply that some people (George Lucas especially) do make a buttload of money from copyrights older than 15 years. I was only contesting your point that it "wouldn't really shock anyone's system", as you put it.
How much money does Lucas make from the original Star Wars trilogy again?
From the Wikipedia article you link to:
Making full copies for the purpose of time shifting, format shifting, and backup for personal non-commercial use is regarded as fair use under the Sony Betamax case law. Hence the legality of VCR's and Tivo. Various DRM schemes seek to make this impossible, and the DMCA makes exercising these rights illegal even where tools exist to do it.
Further, DRM also prevents fair use with regards to quoting and excerpting, regardless of the purpose. I can't clip a scene from a movie purchased from iTunes for the purpose of reviewing it on my blog, for example. At least not without first breaking the DRM.
For the record, I don't buy DRMed media. But my unwillingness has absolutely nothing to do with a desire to get it for free or share it on P2P networks.
There's a big difference between the market's inevitable adoption of Vista and the market's adoption of the DRM laden media-playback features of Vista.
It's rather telling, IMHO, that the iPod, iTunes software, Zune, Windows Media Player, and every "PlaysForSure" player out there continue to support playback of mp3's. Despite all the "success" of Apple's iTunes, I note that it hasn't exactly started a mass migration away from the mp3 format. At something like 4 iTMS tracks sold per iPod, something tells me people aren't filling up their players via that route.
I think that if Apple turned off mp3 support for the iPod and insisted it *only* play DRM-protected tracks from the iTMS, the iPod's marketshare would drop to nothing overnight. And while some small percentage of people might go for whatever music store Microsoft puts on the Vista desktop, I similarly suspect it won't displace the un-DRMed mp3 anytime soon, nor will Microsoft prevent the playback of un-DRMed music.
It's not about "watching them for free". It's about being able to exercise my legal fair use rights over media that I legally purchased.
I'm not sure past performance is a predictor of future results. There have most certainly been societies that wiped themselves out before. The key difference is that these were all isolated - when you have a hundred different independent civilizations, some can fall while the others continue to rise.
For all intents and purposes, the human race is one single civilization now, with more interdependencies between opposite ends of the globe than anyone can possibly be aware of. We also, for the first time in history (meaning in the last fifty years or so) have the capacity to affect globe-spanning changes. If our society dies out, we may very well take the human race with us.
The best example of this is with Windows itself. Let's say you're and entrepreneur starting a business. At the beginning, you have no income and very little cash on hand - you're going to minimize expenditures as much as is humanly possible.
So are you going to start off paying hundreds of dollars for each Windows and Office license? Heck no. Odds are, you're going to start with pirated copies. As the business grows and you can afford it, you'll start to worry about license compliance, buy legitimate copies and send thousands of dollars to Microsoft.
But let's pretend for a second that piracy wasn't an option, that Microsoft actually manages to come up with perfect DRM for it's software. Is that same entrepreneur going to pay the license fees Windows in the beginning? Heck no. In that situation, he'd probably figure out a way to make his shop run on Linux instead. And as the business grows and he gets to the point he can afford licenses... he'll still be running on Linux.
That's how piracy helps the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, and some of these other software shops - "free" pirated versions help establish their software as "the standard". If they manage to lock out of the market all these people who couldn't afford to pay for it - small shops, college students, amateur enthusiasts, etc. - they'd lose their lock on the market.
It used to be that when a friend needed an OS I'd give them a copy of XP (since inevitably they lost the restore CD's that came with their Dell or whatnot). Microsoft's anti-piracy measures with Vista are such that I'm starting to hand out Ubuntu CD's instead. Non-techies barely notice the difference once I've gotten their email working. But I'm sure Microsoft will start to feel the impact of that if enough users make the same decision.
While I understand these complaints (sort of), they always struck me as unfounded. As far as connectivity goes - I've had hard disks fail more times in the last year than my net connection has. If we're not yet in the age of ubiquitous internet connectivity, we will be pretty shortly.
I think for the average user, web based applications are an ideal solution. Most of the "advantages" of the personal computer have been a disaster for the average joe - it puts them in the pilot's seat when the best place for him is really back in the passenger area. Here's how I see it, with Gmail as the example:
- Google uses redundant storage and backip schemes. Any email sitting locally on the average joe's computer likely isn't.
- He doesn't need to install the application, just point to a web site.
- Upgrades are automatic, there's nothing for him to maintain.
- Google removes viruses, he's not dependent on keeping his symantec/mcafee subscription up to date and making sure all the software is working as it should.
- He can't crash or break the application.
Then there's the features desktop software can't match, like universal accessibility, synchronization across PC's, collaboration and sharing abilities (not so much with email but with other applications). For enterprises, it makes a lot more sense to use a bunch of dumb terminals and keeping all the application logic and data where it can be centrally managed.
Well, the topic is primarily on Google's non-search products - where the need to be number one is much less clear. Like I can't believe that there's not room for both Gmail and Yahoo Mail to co-exist, and both to be profitable for their owners. They're different products that serve different types of customers.
And there's no reason the same thing can't eventually happen with "search". The problem now is that there's very little differentiation in search - but there's no real reason that will always be so. There may emerge competitors who are "significantly better" than Google, but the questions that follow are "Better at finding what? And for whom?". It may wind up that there will be a better search engine for my grandparents to use than the one I'd use for myself, or smaller players focusing on a single vertical that can be superior to Google (Like Technorati, for instance).
News of the purchase came as positive news to Wall Street, while reaction across the tech industry was more varied. Steve Ballmer was quoted saying "I'm going to f*cking kill Mars", and attempted to destroy the planet by throwing a chair at it.
Well, they integrated RSS a whole lot better (I love being able to set my default RSS reader). The spellchecker is pretty sweet and works a lot better than the extensions that previously tried to provide the same functionality (at least in my experience). Session restore and the tab handling are nice as well. Plus there's the speed and memory improvements.
Though in general, I agree, their versions seem off - the 1.5 release always baffled me a bit, and if my understanding is correct they plan for the 3.0 release barely a few months from now in early 07.
In the end though, I choose to look at it this way: The betas were actually betas, and the release candidates were actually release candidates, which is more than you can say for some companies *cough*Google*cough*Microsoft*cough* that treat them as marketing terms.
I read this and immediately thought "Google Book Search".
And on that note, I think the response to the GP and GGP is to let Google handle it. Their whole business would fall apart and the internet itself would come crashing down if current copyright law were strictly enforced online. Their cash cow absolutely depends on being able to access and index the long tail of content, and as such they seem to be making a deliberate effort to re-define or at least expand fair use rights, and maybe even do something about the orphan works problem.
They have a vested interest in copyright reform and a war chest of billions of dollars to make it happen. Wikimedia's resources would be better spent elsewhere.
As other respondents pointed out, it already exists :)
But there's a kernel of a good idea here - take the current dictionary model and expand it into a textbook for learning other languages. The wiki model could work well here as native speakers could translate idiomatic phrases and develop the initial lessons of sentence structure.
If I had Del.icio.us, I'm not sure I'd even bother to try to monetize the service itself. The data it generates is way more valuable than any ads thrown against it. If Yahoo integrated that data (and the data from MyWeb) into their search engine, it'd give them a way to differentiate from Google and maybe even draw users away from them. Right now, search algorithms still work by ranking primarily by inbound links. Del.icio.us gives at least two more solid data points to use - the keywords that *users* associate with pages and the number of *users* who found that page useful enough to save. If they rolled out a few more features, like "search only the pages/sites I've saved/tagged with X" - they could easily give Google a run for their money, bump up their search market share and reap the financial rewards of that.
Yahoo's social properties give them a huge advantage over Google if they chose to leverage them for something other than advertising. Integrating that social data into search could give them a pretty big edge that Google can't easily match.
One more thought (since I hit submit too soon in the last reply): I think you're right that it'll be a "paradigm shift", but not to cell phones. (Cell phones are already here after all, that's not much of a shift).
Something in the Zune's marketing rung true to me, even though it's laughable to say it about the Zune at this point. But what's ultimately going to take down the iPod (at least in its current form) will be a "portable MySpace".
In the next couple of years we'll start to see some major metro areas finally deploy blanket wi-fi coverage, and ubiquitous internet connectivity will become a reality is some major markets. This makes possible all sorts of applications we can barely imagine today. But just for a start imagine a portable device that's truly "social" in that it can maintain a friend's list and report their status and what you're friends are listening to. Let you VOIP to them. Let you post to your MySpace page with pictures and video. Download and watch videos from YouTube. In other words, a device that's fully webified, and bypasses the mobile phone carriers that would charge you an arm and a leg for every byte you download.
The biggest barrier to an mp3 playing phone isn't a technological one, it's the mobile phone carriers. They're all chomping their bits at the idea of a music player phone - but they want to make sure you can only buy music from them, at an exorbitant price, with no way to move the tracks off the phone (forcing you to buy again if you lose or replace the phone). In short, they're greedy SOB's that can't see past the ends of their noses, so a viable mp3 phone is going to be a long time coming.
I don't know about you, but the whole reason I put stuff on my blog is to generate discussion. I rarely get contacted by anyone, but I can't imagine being annoyed if the subject of my posts took the time to respond to them.
Yes! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to return home to catch the end of a thousand year old Leno monologue.
Please. We all know that we'd only have to send Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith after them armed with a Macintosh computer. My only worry would be if the aliens have upgraded to the Intel Macs yet, thus ensuring that the virus would be compatible.
I'm reminded of many a game of Civilization that turned out that way (with the help of cheat codes, anyway).
Well that's the thing - some people do want to use Outlook, mostly because it's what they're used to. That's the audience Yahoo is going for.
Google's customer base (for products other than their basic search) seems to be a lot geekier than Yahoo's. So whereas the Slashdot crowd is likely to appreciate the way Gmail works, Yahoo's customers are less technically inclined and would value familiarity above all.
The problem with the Slashdot crowd's thinking (and most tech bloggers for that matter) is they imagine that there's one giant market for webmail, and Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail are going head-to-head. But that's not how Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are thinking about it. They see it in terms of geek webmail users, power users, casual users, internet-savvy users, technophobic users, etc. Then they sit and ask themselves which segments they stand the best chance of capturing, and build a product tailored for those markets.
(Personally, I love Gmail - it actually got me away from using Thunderbird as my mail client because I like the webmail UI so much. But I'm a geek.)