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)
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.....
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....
Re:competition (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:competition (Score:3, Interesting)
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: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, Interesting)
I trust Google. I trust Yahoo. I don't trust Microsoft/hotmail.
One of the interesting things about how Google has been able to increase the perceived value of their gmail service is that you need an invite (thanks turg [slashdot.org]).
It also creates a "web of trust". People who have been invited by other people are less likely to use a gmail account to spamminate everyone. This is the true innovation of gmail.
Re:competition (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider this scenario:
Hopefully, someone from gmail will recognize the value of keeping the invite system, either exclusively, or alongside a seperate open system.
Anyone want to point this thread to the gmail developers?
Re:competition (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:competition (Score:3, Funny)
1.Offer 1GB email storage capacity to a few thousand users in a beta program
2.Wait for competitor's to match your offer and lose millions by offering 100x more storage capacity as before for free
3.Cancel beta test and never launch service
4.PROFIT!!!
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:Too little too late (Score:5, Funny)
Is the bee's knees similar to the cat's ass?
If your not sure, sent an invite to gmail and I will do a thorough analysis for you!
Re:Too little too late (Score:4, Interesting)
Goodbye Hotmail, you've lost me as a customer.
If you build it.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If you build it.... (Score:5, Informative)
Go Google Go!! (Score:5, Funny)
Step 2 - invest in Hard drives, and wait until MS and others implement size increases
Step 3 - declare it was a joke all along
Step 4 - ???
Step 5 - IPO !!!
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:Go Google Go!! (Score:5, Funny)
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
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
All the storage I need. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:All the storage I need. (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus, I like being able to check it at work, where all I have access to is a terminal during my lunch hour.
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:All the storage I need. (Score:4, Informative)
Unless you've got a static IP (or good DDNS), and your ISP doesn't do port filtering, you can't get at that storage from just anywhere. Gmail's available from anywhere you've got a recent web browser.
Additionally, Gmail has pretty darned good search capabilities into that storage (it *is* Google, after all).
About the only thing I can really complain about Gmail is that it's so heavily reliant on Javascript. It'd be really nice if it worked through a text-based browser.
Re:All the storage I need. (Score:4, Informative)
in my case its exim4+squirrelmail+noip.com
gmail really cannot compare
Re:All the storage I need. (Score:5, Interesting)
The real good stuff comes in the form of a clean and fast interface, being able to use Google search on your mail, threaded display of your messages, having webmail that doesn't blast you with intrusive ads, and so on.
Email Arms Race (Score:2, Insightful)
Has google kicked off an email arms race that will end in tears?
Re:Email Arms Race (Score:3, Funny)
capitalism's finest (Score:4, Funny)
Re:capitalism's finest (Score:5, Interesting)
1. P2P Applications
2. Binary Newsgroups
3. Bittorrent
4. IRC
5. FTP
6. Messenger to messenger.
6. Now anonymous based e-mail accounts.
The RIAA is currently trying to sue users of #1. They might go after #3, 4 and 5. They can't stop #2 and #6. They've lost, whether you believe that mp3 trading is copyright infringement or not.
It will be put to good use (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, but Gmail's better (Score:5, Interesting)
They have to fix the fact that their services are crap before handing out space willy-nilly.
Not to mention.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better (Score:5, Interesting)
The main problem I have with hotmail is its lack of respect for sent mails, it is up to a user to say they want to save every outgoing message, and even then, they are deleted frequently.
It just stops it being usable for anything other than signups and notifications.
gMail has made it easy and fun once again, and I'm glad the others are panicing.
Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better (Score:5, Interesting)
However, in googles case, leaving the mails ONLINE actually makes for a better solution, since taking the mail offline and into which ever mail applications store prevents the pigeons from sorting and searching my mail, it becomes just a dump, and for that, a smallish standard account is better suited.
I prefer having google searching my personal mails and its grouping and management are better than any of the offline pop mail programs I've tried.
There is room in this world for both types of account, for instance, I wouldn't even consider moving business mails onto ANY of the free providers, thats just suicidal, but for personal mails google just wipes the floor with everything else out there.
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:Yeah, but Gmail's better (Score:3, Informative)
It is important to note that GMail is *FULL* of JavaScript and is unusuable w/o it. For me that's completely acceptable as my mobile Internet doesn't support Javascript and no one should anyway.
If they would switch to something that didn't require JavaScript (and wasn't just so damn sluggish) I would also hop on the bandwagon. Until then I will stick to my standard email setup.
Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better (Score:3, Informative)
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:Yeah, but Gmail's better (Score:3, Funny)
Does anybody use all that space? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hard disk manufacturers happy campers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Time to invest in Seagate?
Wouldn't it be funny (Score:5, Funny)
Now that Yahoo and Hotmail and everyone else has done the "look, we're offering 1Gig storage too!"
This is all well and good, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Its funny -- in all the hyperbole about the disk space being offered, people are neglecting some of the real innovations/advancements GMail has managed.
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.
problem since upgrade (Score:2)
Whats the diffrence? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember years ago when the max e-mail size wasn't 2mb and you suddenly got mail bombed? You had to go looking through 100's of pages of mail and deleting all the junk. All that work is enough to give anybody carpel tunnel syndrome. Also, Hotmail's recent restriction on opening only one page at a time only makes the matter worse.
The reason why Gmail can give 1GB of space is because it has developed an excellent system of mail archival, retrieval and display. So unless Hotmail changes its interface and pulls something as good as Google, we are soon going to see frustrated users shifting through many pages of spam.
Re:Whats the diffrence? (Score:5, Informative)
Many people are utterly startled when they find out hotmail has filters.. You can even apply them to old mail, not just new incoming messages.
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.
Re:Whats the diffrence? (Score:4, Interesting)
I dread to think what'll happen when he's got 2Gb to play with.
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.
Re:Is it really a good idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
> I just don't trust a free service provider to care too much about my data.
You are conflating two issues. Of course it's a good idea to have the data stored non-locally. If your office/house burns down, you're going to thank those servers.
Store your data in multiple locations if you're worried about it. Get 2,3,5,10,50 free accounts and treat them like a RAID server if its data you just can't afford to lose.
Whether or not a service is free is irrelev
Re:p2p? (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
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.
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
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:Whoever you use for your free email, thank Goog (Score:3, Informative)
Competition? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Competition? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Competition? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that you don't seem to realize this confirms they have been wildly succesful doing just that...
fast. lightweight interface vs slow, ad-ridden one (Score:5, Interesting)
If the Gmail interface is as fast as the google interface, gmail will eat hotmail and yahoo for lunch.
Re:fast. lightweight interface vs slow, ad-ridden (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:fast. lightweight interface vs slow, ad-ridden (Score:3, Interesting)
i don't have to download spam mail from my isp which can take a while on a 56k connection of you have >150 spam emails. With google not only does it sort the spam nicely and out the way, it stops me having to download the body of the email.
Couple that with the other great features of gmail and the fact that i won't fill it and i don't have much reason to use my isp's email address.
The only time i use my isp's email address is for job and univers
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: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 sensibl
Paging Apple, paging apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, .mac does a shitload more than these others, but, hey, it's time to boost! :)
Re:Paging Apple, paging apple (Score:3, Funny)
We are storry to inform you that becuase our Xstor RAID isn't scalable enough and its RAID cannot be rebuilt online, we are currently unable to provide any extra space to our faithful customers.
Please wait until the new and more powerful version of Xstor RAID is released and check back again!
Sincerely,
Apple Customer Service
New Delhi
Re:Paging Apple, paging apple (Score:3, Interesting)
I've used it a fair bit, since I used to work for a guy who hosted 4 different web sites from his
My impression was, it's way too slow. Apple's only attempt to "address" this issue was to try to cache everything locally on your hard drive in OS X Panther, so it *appears* to be more responsive, rather than solving the real problem.
Not only that, but
aventuremail (Score:4, Informative)
Re:aventuremail (Score:4, Informative)
Aventure Mail Error
We are currently not accepting new registrations. Accounts can be purchased in our store (http://www.aventuremail.co.uk/store) in the mean time.
Compression for fun and profit. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Next month... (Score:4, Insightful)
My take on it all (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm thinking about rolling my own searchable e-mail archive. And it won't be limited to one poxy gigabyte, either! I could register a domain and point the MX to my TV cable broadband connection, but the IP address is not guaranteed truly static, so there's a possibility that mail could get lost or even wind up on someone else's box -- so I'll trust my existing PO3 connection for now, counting it as another reason to add to my list in favour of a "proper" (read: business class) broadband connection. Next I'll hack Spamassassin to bits: when I'm done, it will store the header info and spamminess test results in a MySQL database, and the body in a text file. While I'm at it, I'll index the attachments in terms of mime type and encoding into another database. Finally, I'll set up some scripts to manage searching according to my databases and body contents.
Eventually -- which is to say, once I can go a month without resorting to phpMyAdmin or grep -- I'll release it; probably under a BSD-like licence, but with this extra little clause: "Any redistribution of the software or derived work in binary form must be accompanied by an offer of the source code, to be valid until the lapse of copyright on the work in question".
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.
In related news ... (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of the Cold War (Score:5, Interesting)
Gmail only has a couple of thousand users, so it can continue upping it's storage. Hotmail & Yahoo follow suit, but with it's million users, they asplode!
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.
The real war behind the Gig storage battles (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to hear about alternatives and what this means for the IT/ISP players in the next few years. To elucidate on all this:
It doesnt take a Ph.D to add 1 + 2; and maybe consider a more standards driven approach as in (3)
(1)Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, etc. all want to have your personal info for targeted advertising. Both Microsoft and Apple are researching a system whereby all the info in your hard drive is easily searchable.
(2)All indications are that most computing will soon be delivered over the (internet) pipes, with broadband available everywhere. ( SUN's original motto, then IBM's, now everyone's)
Well, personally, until the dust settles on the privacy issues I wouldnt mind having a GMail account to use as "light" personal/business info internet folder.
I use my own server VPN connection meantime, so I can already always access all my files from anywhere. But i dont see it being a practical mode for the majority of users - as
(3)which goes back to the issue, might it not be better in the meantime for all ISP's to adopt a standard user-friendly personal data repository, possibly mirroring what the user has at home/office ?
Andre
PS. Slightly off topic, on a personal note: if I'm on target on this issue, that would make it 3 out of 3. (previous posts indicated that the MAC
Gmail speed (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a friend who has a paid Yahoo! account and I sent him an invite while he was over at my place. He logged in to Yahoo! to retrieve the invite (which of course had been placed in the Spam folder, but that's neither here nor there). When he finally found it and got signed up he couldn't stop talking about how cool Gmail was, how fast it was, thanks a lot for the invite, etc. etc.
Then the next day Yahoo! upped their space for paid users to 2 gigs or whatever it was, and all the sudden he was gloating about "I have TWO gigs!".
Yeah, man. Two gigs of a service you were blasting yesterday for being slow and inferior. Whatever.
I guess the point is that to some extent these carrots are working, and they're able to make users forget their pain by offering more space.
I have faith that in time he'll remember how fast his Gmail account is and start moving over there. Our friends and family can be extracted from the dark side - it'll just take some work.
Oh, what? You don't have a Gmail account yet? Well, I gots four invites left - hit me up at kevinomara bat gmail mot com.
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?
Look what happens (Score:4, Interesting)
http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/
Good on google for not censoring it, Cant imagine MS would allow that..
Re:Look what happens (Score:3, Informative)
The best webmail service offers NO storage (Score:3, Informative)
No account sign-up, no password, just type in any user account name you can think of and check the email for it. Works great for the bazillion or so sites out there that have "free registration" but require a valid email address. All emails are deleted after a few hours.
Re:Very good news (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Very good news (Score:5, Funny)
TRANSLATION:
Hmm. True. Imagine if Google hadn't launched GMail, you would still have only 2mb on hotmail, like you've had for the last 8 years! On the other hand most of the email I receive is SPAM or junk mail forwards (Almost 2mb worth), now I have 200mgs to look forward too, (wait until I get 2gbs! Haha
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 i
Re:Hotmail is sweet! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:MSN Hotmail: behind the competition (Score:3, Interesting)
Yahoo! Mail was the first to upgrade their service following Gmail's storage boost.
If you send email messages to some Hotmail address, they bounce them back to you with no aparent reasons. And don't say that you haven't had some email message bounced back saying "action failed". As I don't save all my email messages, many proofs are gone.
I remember once that I wrote about 10 email messages to a Hotmail.com user and he only got one. In my last message I was asking if he had a non-Hot
Re:And it will still be no good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Will Yahoo upgrade accounts for other countries (Score:3, Informative)
The brilliance behind this strategy... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Gmail=Good IDea, Poor Execution (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree totally. Gmail's two-phase rollout has given Google the option to observe the competition's response and react to it before their service is even officially launched (not to mention creating a buzz that would make Seth Godin [sethgodin.com] proud).
I've had a GMail account for about two months now and the system is in a constant state of flux. I've reported bugs one day and they've been fixed the next. Each and every bug report or piece of feedback gets a personal response from the Google team. They are very serious about perfecting the system.
The only reason Google are waiting so long to launch it is because they want to make sure it's the best webmail out there bar none. When it's launched, that's when the comparisons can really start. And that's when Hotmail et al won't be able to shake a stick at Gmail.
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
Don't be a Hater! ;-) (Score:5, Insightful)