Well well,
Gmail Gmail, not even public yet and still impacting strategies from the Big Guns. Gmail (Google Mail) when released will be offering free email accounts with storage space of 1 GB, their motto, "Don't sort just search with Goggle and never delete any mail". Well sure you can say that when you have 100 thousand servers at your disposal. So is the commercial email industry doomed?
Well not quite, Gmail has its own problems to deal with, there have been frequent criticisms from privacy experts and a California state legislator, who have objected the company's plan to scan all incoming mails for keywords to serve targeted Ads.
But, still they are offering 1 GB in an age where getting 25 MB email storage forces you to shell out big bucks.
But, Yahoo! has the answer, they have recently increased their free mail account limit from 4 MB to 100 MB, where single messages can be upto 10 MB and are also offering 2 GB of storage space for paid customers at only 19.95 USD/year, now that's some fight back. In a recent presentation, Jim Brock, the company's senior vice president of communication and consumer services, said, "The objective here is to make storage quotas irrelevant to users". And I agree, but when Gmail is out, I doubt anybody apart from the existing users will be using Yahoo! Mail's free accounts, and to be frank I don't think anybody will be needing paid 2 GB storage just for their emails, when one can have a GB account for free. So how lucrative this offer is, only time will tell.
Though, I feel if Yahoo! combines this mail offer with some webspace offer by allowing users to use the same space for their website hosting too and if possible store all their address books, chat archives and everything related there itself, then I all I can say is, "Kaching", you have a
hot selling cake in your hands (hmm, I wonder whether I should have posted this idea here and instead of sending it to Yahoo! in exchange of some paid a/c's
). Either way, Yahoo!'s shares just went up after this 100 MB offer and being an investor, I am all happy with the news.
I wonder what MSN Hotmail is planning ...
