Hotmail, Others Follow Gmail's Storage Boost 623
BobPaul writes "Following behind Yahoo Mail's recent upgrade to 100MB of free storage, and trailing behind GMail's 1GB (last mentioned here), ZDNet reports that Hotmail will soon boost email storage as well. 'The upgrade will increase Hotmail's free e-mail storage limits from 2 megabytes to 250MB and its paid e-mail service, which costs $19.95 a year, from 10MB to 2 gigabytes. The changes will begin in early July.' Another interesting tidbit from the article: 'Ask Jeeves also plans to grant its e-mail subscribers more storage room... According to an e-mail sent to iWon users, Ask Jeeves plans to give each of the sites' e-mail subscribers 125MB of free storage.'"
competition (Score:4, Insightful)
Email Arms Race (Score:2, Insightful)
Has google kicked off an email arms race that will end in tears?
Hard disk manufacturers happy campers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Time to invest in Seagate?
Re:competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Think how little progress we'd see if large segments of the IT industry were dominated by single large corporations with no incentive to innovate..... oh wait.....
Its good to see them changing.... (Score:5, Insightful)
They have to Googleize, and learn that small, relavent banners produce more then spaming me with flashy popups that install spyware, and that Mozilla/GoogleToolbar will block.
But it is a step in the right direction.
Re:Very good news (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it really a good idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't trust a free service provider to care too much about my data.
Hotmail sucks. (Score:4, Insightful)
It took Google to do this! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what happens when you sit around and be complacent.
Well done Google! The others are just playing catch-up.
Whoever you use for your free email, thank Google (Score:5, Insightful)
If Gmail hadn't appeared to shake up the status quo then Yahoo, Hotmail, etc would still be providing storage in the 2MB region rather than two or three orders of magnitude more.
Re:competition (Score:4, Insightful)
MS and Yahoo are offering the e-mail systems that they are now because they know Google is going to steal a lot of their business (The business model is draw in people with free accounts and try to sell more).
Actually, if you think about it, this is probably going to really hurt MS and Yahoo's business because much fewer people see the need for having more than 100mb of mail, as opposed to needing more than 6mb.
Google may just be hurting this whole e-mail industry more than it is helping.
And just to add a little twist to this comment, imagine of MS was doing what Google is doing. People would be screaming bloody murder and citing the reason I cited above. Sort of sad really....
I'm still not seeing the point.... (Score:2, Insightful)
what if I'm not online? what if I'm in hicksville on my laptop and want to access an old email message from someone for some really important reason (yeah I know, incoherent sentence, but bear with me)
with the POP mail I have, my messages are RIGHT HERE. In have no need to go connecting to tha Intarweb to do this, right? but Gmail's amazing search capabilities so heavily plugged, are aimed right at this, going through your archived mail, right?
Is there some link I'm not making here? Forgive me, I'm in the pub so maybe I'm just lost.
Re:Go Google Go!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most normal users won't get anywhere near filling a gMail account for a good long time.
Its used to show the difference between the good and the bad.
Now - when google move into ISP land, with 100mbit broadband i'll be happy
Re:Its good to see them changing.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I am a regular Yahoo user and the few times I've had to use it from IE I've gone mad with all the annoyingly fast flash animations and popups.
OTOH, I browse with colours disabled to so maybe I am weird
It's funny... (Score:4, Insightful)
And now that Microsoft has disallowed signing up for a Passport with a non-Microsoft email address, tieing these (usually) MSN Messenger using Hotmail to Hotmail, we'll have lots of people locked into it, and they'll bitch, piss and moan at you to help them, then ignore you.
God, I love users who are deluded as to the utter shitness of their email service. Trust me, I know loads of them.
(I'll bet there's not one Hotmail account NOT covered in spam by now. They're all just spam buckets. Evil, evil Hotmail...we hates it my precioussssss...)
Re:All the storage I need. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I'm still not seeing the point.... (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand what if you are in hicksville without your laptop and want to access an old email. Being stored on a webmail account means you can access it with any internet connection computer anywhere. Which for those of us without a laptop is a definite plus.
Personally I think a mixture is the best solution. Forward your email to Gmail, but also keep it on your own machine. Then you don't have to access the internet every time you want to read an email, but you can read your emails from any internet connected computer.
p2p? (Score:2, Insightful)
WTF? (Score:1, Insightful)
Too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
For several years I've had to trim all kinds of stuff out of my email archives due to the claustrophobic 4- and 6-meg limit on Yahoo mail. Then suddenly I log in and there's 100 meg available. Well that sucks, I've deleted maybe half that in stuff I'd rather have kept over the years. And it's still Yahoo; they still puke up obnoxious ads every chanse they get, and at the end of every single outgoing message.
On the other hand, since the dot-bomb, most over-the-web services have gotten crippled or disappeared entirely for non-paying users. It's a breath of fresh air to see some things actually improve, regardless Microsoft's and Yahoo's motives for doing so.
If an all but ad-free environment, a clean interface and the other Google niceties become competitive features that many webmail services mimmick, then great, everybody wins, including those unwilling to switch services. But for my money (or lack of it), I'd rather be signed up with an outfit whose mission statement amounts to "don't be evil" rather than "always be evil except to save face".
Re:All the storage I need. (Score:5, Insightful)
now, personally, i think that while gmail will be enticing (and i'll certainly sign up when given a chance), they'll need to really provide more than email. yahoo's calendar is really nice. it becomes a challenge now to simply forget when the date you officially became a domesticated individual.
Re:p2p? (Score:4, Insightful)
Compression for fun and profit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Next month... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is it really a good idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, bear in mind that this makes you their product which they are selling to their customers, the advertisers.
And it's the customer who is always right.
KFG
Re:It's funny... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a fair bit of hassle notifying all your contacts, updating mailing list subscriptions, changing account details at online retailers and soforth.
Especially as AFIAK Hotmail doesn't allow you to forward your emails to another account - besides, it's just be shut down after a month of "inactivity" anyway, so it's far from a sensible option.
Well, the desire for bigger profits I suppose. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, you're absolutely right - storage costs next to nothing per-megabyte, and compression can make it go a lot farther. But consider it like this: almost all the free email services have 'free' and 'premium' offers, and the main thing that differentiates the free from the 'premium' is how much storage you get.
Now, when they give free customers >= 100MBytes of storage, there is less reason to pay for the premium service. So, until GMail came in and broke the cartel's artificial shortage, the email services could count on plenty of people coughing up the cash to get a useable amount of storage.At this point, given the above, why are they increasing their storage quotas? . . . Because if all the free & premium customers decided to move over to GMail (or at least a significant percentage of the user-base), then their current revenues would plummet fast. So, while they get a lot less money per 'free' customer (just the revenue they derive from advertising), by increasing the storage, they mostly take away the prime driver for people to go to GMail.
Predictions: now that GMail is eating away at their ability to sell 'premium' accounts with more storage, I expect that
Re:Go Google Go!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed - and even if everyone in the world filled it up, how much would be genuinely unique content. Not much, I'd guess the size ratio would be something like:
70% - Funny videos of dancing monkeys or Powerpoint jokes
25% - MP3 files, zipped software (legal or not)
5% - genuine emails
Of the 95% size, Google would keep one copy of the file and link the others (hell - they probably already have a copy in \pub\jokes anyway)
Re:And it will still be no good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It took Google to do this! (Score:5, Insightful)
You think so? I don't. I think the others are playing "user retention". They're trying to lower the impact of 1GB of space on their existing user base. Remember the incumbants have some inertia on their side. Most people don't want to have to deal with changing their email address. So if you make the storage disparity less, then it makes the cost of changing your email address more.
I think this will have the exact intended effect. Users were tempted to put up with the pain of changing their email address to get the huge increase in space. Those same users probably won't switch now, because they've not got 100x more space than they used to have. Space isn't an issue anymore. Changing your email address is.
IMHO, it's a good move by these guys.
I think that google's response to this should be to offer free, permanant email forwarding. Essentially, what they'd be saying is this: OK, yes, you have to switch your email address today. But it's the last time you'll ever have to switch your email address... EVER. Do this, and it lowers the long term cost of switching your email address to gmail.
$.02
Re:Competition? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that you don't seem to realize this confirms they have been wildly succesful doing just that...
Re:Go Google Go!! (Score:3, Insightful)
The same could hold true for viruses, trojans and spam inside mails.
If google decide to zap one virus, then they have zapped it worldwide and cured a problem instantly.
There are problems with implimenting such a (on the surface) simple solution however. Not anything the massed collection of PHDs and brainiacs at Google couldn't solve though
Gmail=Good IDea, Poor Execution (Score:2, Insightful)
The barriers to switching email address are high; no one wants to ditch the address they may have been using for seven years. gmail's real selling point was the extra storage, but with that advantage negated I don't see so many people likely switch.
Compare with this scenario:
gmail carries out large scale internal testing, carries out a low-key public beta (no additional invites, etc.) and then BOOM! Press announcement "gmail is up and running!!!" . Users now flock to the service because the other providers don't currently offer anything like the storage space of gmail.
the gmail rollout could definitely be handled better. aside from the goolgle fanboys, how many regualr hotmail/yahoo useres will switch now that hotmail/yahoo have increased storage?
Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better (Score:5, Insightful)
it's fast, incredibly intuitive. I'm in love.
the only thing I didn't like was the lack of new mail notification, so I downloaded Pop Goes the GMail (windows only... one downside -- but I doubt its long before something like this comes along for other platforms) and it takes care of that for me.
In short I'm never going back to any other webmail service. It'll take me a lot to pry me away from GMail.
Re:Whats the diffrence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has pulled off a perfect rope-a-dope scheme, perhaps unintentionally. At first, GMail appears vulnerable since Microsoft and Yahoo could easily match its 1 GB storage. But that's not GMail's real strength. By its competitors raising their storage limits, they are *emphasizing* their own strategic *weaknesses* (no automatic organization, lousy searching), and Google will pummel them in the webmail market with its arsenal of exclusive advantages.
backup solution (Score:3, Insightful)
1GB not the only draw (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, and sometimes more importantly, Gmail's ads are so unobtrusive and relevent that implementations like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail seem like complete jokes with their flashy, intrusive, irrelevent ads.
Is not size what matters.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google move was to give not only a big enough (?) space for mail, but also a interface to effectively deal with it, and...well, google to search within.
Is like those pills that have "the vitamin C of 40 lemons" or something similar, you can handle that in that way, will feel like a pill but will have the amount you need, but if a "traditional" vendor gives you to eat 40 lemons to get that amount of vitamin C at the same price, and try to eat all of this you will end with problems. The "content" will be the same, but in a way that will be hard to deal with it.
Re:Gmail=Good IDea, Poor Execution (Score:5, Insightful)
Always remember; Gmail isn't just about the space, it's also about the UI as well. It definitely isn't easy for either Hotmail or Yahoo or any other webmail to compete against it easily.
Re:.MAC (Score:4, Insightful)
Unknown. But I think Apple is one company that probably realizes that they need to do more than just add a lot more space. What are you going to do with a gig of e-mail storage unless you also get some cool tools for sorting through it all?
Besides, I think most
Don't get me wrong: I'm looking forward to the day when Apple increases the e-mail limit for
Yet another space competition game? (Score:3, Insightful)
After couples months, most of them declared a free "large space" emails are "unmaintainable". Sina decreased their account from 50M to 5M, and even a company called 263 canceled their free email service, "As a professional ISP, we dont need click rate from the unrelated public" they explained the reason something like that.
Till now etang still provides unlimited space [etang.com] email access if you pay about 40 USD a year(Sorry, it is Chinese). But most people never interest it.
Regarding my previous experiense, a "unlimited" email space is not the key point attacting public to their service. The more important question is : HOW LONG?
Don't be a Hater! ;-) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Competition? (Score:1, Insightful)
Memory or Storage space? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as the design of GMail I am not all that impressed. Search functions are nice and all but I don't use searchs that much. The "conversations" aren't exactly what I want as I would prefer standard folders. I certainly don't like not having an option to keep ALL old emails open in a conversation w/o having to click on them to "expand"). The filters are nice and seem to work well for my uses but I haven't played around with them enough to see just how useful they are.
I haven't received any spam but that's no surprise. I haven't had any issues at work but at home GMail seems sluggish. Almost too sluggish. I don't know why that is but there is a noticable lag after clicking on things at home before actions are taken.
The space is nice and all (and I am forwarding all mail from home -> GMail for now for permanent storage as a test) but it's certainly not necessary. They are going to eliminate it eventually claiming national security or kiddy porno/warez violations.
Re:competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, the original point was regarding the benefit to consumers. It's not hurting anyone, from that perspective. The competition is free and serves to remove excess profits from the industry, not profits altogether (the definition of a market approaching efficiency).
Re:competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not send large attachments over email.
Again, do not send large attachments over email.
Nothing is worse then trying to download a really important email, but being stuck waiting for a hand full of large, mostly less-important messages to download. Ofoto [ofoto.com], Shutterfly [shutterfly.com], and others [google.com] offer free image hosting, allowing your friends & family the chance to view pictures at their leisure -- and often order hard copies as a bonus. Not everybody has broadband access, and us "Technology Haves" should be teaching the "have nots" to 1) not send huge f'in emails and 2) don't blindly open every attachment you get.
In conclusion, do not send large attachments over email.
Re:competition (Score:2, Insightful)
However, Gmail encourages its users to approach e-mail in a new and storage-intensive way, i.e. to "never" delete messages and use search to recover them. The incumbents have standard user interfaces and are not attempting to change their users' usage paradigms. Thus, users of the incumbent systems won't be particularly apt to increase their storage requirements even if more storage is available.
This suggests that the incumbents are not dramatically increasing their costs by permitting larger e-mail storage and that the average Gmail user will have significantly higher storage requirements than users of the incumbent systems.
I also question the extent to which Gmail will become the primary account for people who currently use Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. People don't switch e-mail addresses lightly.
However good the Gmail paradigm may be, it's one of those things like power windows that you have to use to "grok." There's also a bit of a learning curve that might be enough to further discourage users who are perfectly happy where they are.
Re:But google is honest, thats the difference (Score:2, Insightful)
Google is still a company, the point of which is to make a profit. I don't think they're going to do anything nefarious with my e-mail, but I also don't give them any special dispensation because one of their mottos is "Don't be evil." So far they're just a company which makes a very good search engine, and a few peripheral tools and utilities. I don't see anything to make me think they're honest or dishonest, they are just good at providing their service.
Re:Hard disk manufacturers happy campers? (Score:2, Insightful)