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3 Email Chiefs Come to Dinner 207

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the life-and-times dept.
Carl Bialik writes "The heads of email from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all recently went over to Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes's house for dinner and conversation. Gomes has an interesting writeup of the conversation that transpired. The meal started as a lovefest for Gmail and Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond 'agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail.' But Gomes adds, 'Whatever early lead Gmail may have had in creating a next-generation email program, both Microsoft and Yahoo have more than caught up. I wondered out loud to Mr. Buchheit if Gmail, the pioneer, might now be falling behind. "There is a lot more we want to build," he responded.'"
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3 Email Chiefs Come to Dinner More

3 Email Chiefs Come to Dinner

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  • That was the worst joke ever... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:28PM (#14312739)
    It started off ok but the punchline could use some work.

  • And then... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:29PM (#14312748)

    The meal started as a lovefest for Gmail and Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond 'agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail.'

    Reportedly, soon after, Steve Ballmer threw a chair at Mr. Doerr, who was told that he was going to be "fucking killed."

  • 3 Email Heads Walk into a Bar... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Praedon ( 707326 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:29PM (#14312749) Journal
    You can clearly see where that was going, let alone the article. The article was rather interesting to me... I can only picture the rep's from Microsoft and Yahoo eyeing Googles Rep all night long, just waiting for the opportunity to rip him to shreds.
    • Um, I'm sure that the Yahoo guy was the envy of the party. Have you seen the new Yahoo mail beta?
    • Why not? Gmail is still clearly the best of web-based mail services. Yahoo and Microsoft really just don't get it. Gmail could be improved a lot but at least it's going in the right direction. Easy and powerful over flashy.
      • Gmail is still clearly the best of web-based mail services.

        Have you seen the new Yahoo Mail beta?

        But even before the Yahoo Mail beta, I never liked Gmail's interface. The buttons and links are not user friendly, it's inconsistent where to look to find a function. Way too cluttery, especially for Google, which prides itself on minimalism.

        • Have you seen the new Yahoo Mail beta?

          No. The new beta appears to be only for a select group of people (I preferred Gmails invite method, especially now that there's unlimited invites). So I can't really compare the two. A review with screenshots makes it look like an Outlook clone. When will e-mail developers learn that Outlook isn't the pinacle of GUI for e-mails. Google's finally learnt it. When will everyone else?

          And I personally think that Yahoo and Microsoft will continue to hurt themselves whilever

          • Re:3 Email Heads Walk into a Bar... (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            You're right Gmail's beta system is great! They let everyone in to use the service (giving unlimited invites to half the planet is essentially doing just that) and then leave it under beta status indefinitely. That way they can always use the excuse that it's only in beta to make up for the lack of features and overall mediocre quality.

            Google has been hyped up way to much lately. The only thing that they do extremely well is searching the web, and lately their competitors have been innovating in this f
      • Easy and powerful over flashy.

        what about the rss feed that showed up uninvited in my gmail box ?
        the first layer of cruft has already arrived.
      • "Gmail could be improved a lot but at least it's going in the right direction. Easy and powerful over flashy."

        Funny, it's 'flashiness' is what's driving me nuts about it. Don't get me wrong, I love GMail, but it really irritates me that the nice little coding trick they did to make changes in the screen appear without reloading the page overrides the functionality of the back/forward buttons. (Note: You can switch to basic HTML and rectify this problem, but I haven't been able to work out a way for it to
        • *shrugs* I just don't expect back buttons to work on web apps. It's true of probably 99% of web apps and has been for years. I just wish the browser made it easier to override the default button behaviors so that when in the app you could reprogram the functionality.

          My biggest plus for Gmail is that it allows POP access. My biggest down for it is that it doesn't REALLY delete mail accessed by POP so every day or two (with my mail volume) I have to manually do it.

          I like the UI overall although I can certainl
        • The back-button issue bothered me too, but I think they've fixed it. Through what magic, I don't know, but most of the time anyway (much more often than before) back does what you expect it to do.
      • No, they all bug me for one feature - my fave webmail systems are the simple university ones. Why? They use the most nude HTML. While AJAX is lovely for making little HTML forms, spell-checkers, and nice integration with favourites lists, it's a horrid PITA when it comes to links. I hate how I can't middle-click on mail info in Hotmail or Gmail.

        There is a time and place for full-out scripting, and a time and a place for a simple <a href...>. As soon as an action could be described as a "navigatio
        • you could only be talking about squirrelmail, which is the most horrid webmail application i have ever seen. how did that crap become so popular?
          • SquirrelMail: your script seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?

            I recently switched back to a fast reliable IMAP provider that provides SquirrelMail, Horde, and Roundcube. Roundcube is OK, fresh and sort of fast but still buggy and featureless. Horde is horrible.

            SquirrelMail can be made to look good, really it can. The penguin theme that comes with SqM 1.5 (I think) is pretty attractive, I like hierarchical folders over labels, I like actual links that let me open up

  • Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cylix ( 55374 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:32PM (#14312773) Homepage Journal
    I hope they don't mean they have caught up by simply saying, "We have added more free space too!!!"

    I still use Yahoo for all of my spam and I love it for that. It hasn't changed much over what it used to be. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I still accidently use shortcuts in Yahoo... that were intended for Gmail.

    There are more things I want to see out of Gmail, but I'm just not sure where the "caught up" part comes into play.

    • Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)

      by merreborn ( 853723 ) * on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:34PM (#14312790) Journal
      I still use Yahoo for all of my spam and I love it for that. It hasn't changed much over what it used to be.

      You haven't seen their new beta. It's AJAX based, and allows drag and drop --- all in all, it's a lot like using a desktop client (like thunderbird) in your web browser.
      • I admit I havn't really done much research on AJAX yet, but has anyone come out with a BBS system for it similiar to phpBB or vBulletin?
        • The Invision Power board (or whatever it is called, used on http://www.hlfallout.net/ [hlfallout.net] ) uses AJAX for quick replies. We all have seen a button for quick replies at the bottom of a post that just javascripts a new text area there, but this one now does not reload the page on pressing "submit" but also just appends the new post to the thread on the fly.

  • Gmail won.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eieken ( 635333 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:32PM (#14312774) Homepage
    The day I liked using the Gmail interface better then Thunderbird (and of course outlook) was the day I think Gmail won the war of email. If you count all the spiffy Greasemonkey extensions in firefox for Gmail, then you have a really amazing email service.
    • If you count all the spiffy Greasemonkey extensions in firefox for Gmail

      Like what? I'm genuinely curious.
    • hehe, get accounts on them all... Hell, get multiple accounts on them all...
    • Only thing gmail has going for it is conversation threading. I still prefer Outlook web access... right click menu interfaces (why hasnt gmail tried this yet?), no breaking the back button (occasionally it doesnt work with firefox in gmail... they say they don't but they do) advanced rule sets and scripting.

      -everphilski-

  • I disagree (Score:3, Interesting)

    by killmenow ( 184444 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:33PM (#14312782)
    But Gomes adds, 'Whatever early lead Gmail may have had in creating a next-generation email program, both Microsoft and Yahoo have more than caught up.
    I have a yahoo.com email account. I have had it for a long time. I had it before I got my gmail.com account. Now, I hardly use it. GMail is just fantastic. And the latest changes Yahoo! has made to try to catch up can be summed up in one word: abysmal. Here's a clue to the Yahoo! folks trying to jazz up Yahoo! e-mail: stop trying to be pretty and "full of features" and just try staying out of my way. GMail manages to be feature-rich *and* stays out of my way. I don't know how they did it, but it's wonderful.

    I wouldn't know anything about MSN e-mail. I wouldn't touch an MSN account with a 10' cat5 cable.

    Oh, I almost forgot: YMMV.
    • Gmail's inbox size is still going up. 2GB was the starting size

      I just popped over to the gmail page and it says: 2676.615608 megabytes (and counting)

      I think Yahoo has done a lot more than MSN to cautch up. MSN is still waaaay behind when it comes to e-mail & Hotmail's layout is teh suxxor
      • Gmail's starting size was 1Gb.. apparently you didn't get invited early enough. As for yahoo their new beta client looks amazing..
    • I've used Yahoo for a good long time (6 years). I can't give you the name of one cute girl under the age of 21 who uses gmail over yahoo. When Google gets hip, they'll be "king".

      Reality check.
      POP3 is the best, but only for those who know what it means. That's not the actual market, that's just for uber-techs...and hopefully the future.

  • one of many obvious jokes (Score:5, Funny)

    by LodCrappo ( 705968 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:34PM (#14312789)
    Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "what is this, a joke?"
    • On my account at work, most of the spam originates from Microsoft's Hotmail and MSN mail servers.

      Every day, several 419 scam artist send me messages about the millions of dollars they want to transfer to my bank account.
      The SpamAssassin filter catches them all. I semi-automatically forward them to the abuse department of the originating server, and of the dropbox mentioned in the body of the mail (usually at Yahoo Mail).

      The Yahoo mail account is usually deleted the next day. The MSN abuse service takes 2

  • Fix spam! (Score:3, Funny)

    by yamla ( 136560 ) <chris@@@hypocrite...org> on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:36PM (#14312800)
    Microsoft has promised to fix the spam problem by 2006. That's only ten days away! That's great, my little email server is getting about a thousand spams a day so I'm really looking forward to what they roll out. I'm a little concerned, though, that Microsoft hasn't actually announced anything specific that would fix the problem yet, this close to 2006.

  • And Yahoo's Ethan Diamond... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:36PM (#14312801)
    (no relation to the lattice of carbon atoms)

  • Google rules! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jomammy ( 932564 )
    Micrososft and Yahoo are weak compared to the vision Google has. All they both have done for the last 4 years is play catch up and the copy game. Google should shake these two off their coat tails and continue to be industry leaders. Let microsoft continue to develop their subpar OS and let yahoo do whatever they are supposedly good at. Neither can compete with Google in Google's arena!

    • Re:Google rules! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CDPatten ( 907182 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:44PM (#14312866) Homepage
      You are way off man. MS has demonstrated one of the best web clients for years; it comes with Exchange and is called outlook web access.

      That said, MS and Yahoo both have public beta testing for web clients that are far superior to what google has now. Check them out if you don't believe me. What stops them from going public as quickly as google upgrades is that while google has a few million subscribers the other two have 10 of millions. It's a bit different when you deal with grown up numbers.

      Google might have something in the works, but there isn't much buzz in or out of the google campus about it. And as long as their core number of users is small they won't be a real player ... they may be in respects to the media coverage, but certainly not with the numbers.
      • "You are way off man. MS has demonstrated one of the best web clients for years; it comes with Exchange and is called outlook web access."

        I take it that you have never actually used OWA?
      • I've used OWA. Um... not so nice. Bordering on excruciating.
      • MS has demonstrated one of the best web clients for years; it comes with Exchange and is called outlook web access.

        OWA is simply a framed Web site styled to look like its application big brother...the rendering to HTML still occurs completely at the server end. I've been using OWA for almost 6 years now and I think even 2003 is lacking compared to Gmail...it is noticably slower and the main frame must completely reload to do almost anything. One of the big advantages of Gmail is how quickly it responds to a
      • From what i see, 90% of yahoo accounts are robots, or fakers or dupes, or dead accounts.

  • where they all started kissing. What a love fest!

    No seriously, I think stuff like this is great. developers (despite their corporation's enemies) really can benefit from good conversation with their peers. At this level, its good to see the top three disusing things... even if its surface stuff. That isn't often possible with all the red tape out there.

    Kudos to the WSJ for organizing....

  • Caught up? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The article implies that Microsoft has more than caught up, assuming caught up to google with hotmail.

    Maybe I missed it, but Hotmail is still a festering hole of a email service compared to GMail. Its slower, a total spam magnet, and its spam filtering is as useless as a condom with the tip cut off. Oh and the interface hasnt actually changed much. Not to mention GMail keeps piling on the capacity and features.

    Caught up? Riiiiiiiiight

  • Unfortunately, Buchheit kept interrupting to... (Score:5, Funny)

    by loggia ( 309962 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:36PM (#14312807)
    Unfortunately, Buchheit kept interrupting to mention advertisers based on what Doerr and Diamond were talking about.

  • And for dinner they had... (Score:5, Funny)

    by bk4u ( 682315 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:37PM (#14312812) Homepage
    spam egg spam spam bacon and spam

  • Getting Along (Score:2, Insightful)

    by inKubus ( 199753 )
    It seemed like they all get along very nicely. I agree with the other poster that they are just small cranks in a big machine. I do think that Hotmail and Yahoo revolutionized the world back in the day when they unveiled "FREE EMAIL" for everyone. That was around 1998. Before that, you had to pay. All of a sudden, there was no excuse to not have and use an email address.

    Gmail, well.. It's really cool and they were the first major player to give 1GB of space. But still, I don't think Gmail was a real
    • Who gives a flying crap about a gig of space? Gmail rocks my world because it provides POP access for FREE. I can use any email client I want to check my email. THAT rocks.
    • I do think that Hotmail and Yahoo revolutionized the world back in the day when they unveiled "FREE EMAIL" for everyone. That was around 1998. Before that, you had to pay. All of a sudden, there was no excuse to not have and use an email address.

      Sorry, but the advertising footers that go out with most such "free" email services suggests to me that as a recipient, I'm the one paying for it.

      Gmail, well.. It's really cool and they were the first major player to give 1GB of space.

      Yes, but ... There's an inevit

  • These three people... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ruff_ilb ( 769396 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:39PM (#14312828) Homepage
    Shouldn't be mad at each other. The Yahooligan knows that Yahoo is still the #1 most visited website, the MS Man knows that his OS owns, and the google guy gloats over Gmail. Heck, Yahoo and MS have been around way longer than google. It's the upstart, even in this field.
    • And not only that, but it is very rare for executives of leading companies who are competitors to actually be mad at each other...they compete, that is the nature of the game. But they may very well be friends, and I'd be very surprised if this were the first time all three were in the same room for a social gathering.

      Remember, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

  • POP3 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Generic Guy ( 678542 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:44PM (#14312867)
    Gmail is still the only one of the three to still offer free POP3 support. I can use my own favorite client (currently Thunderbird) with gMail. For free.

    • Re:POP3 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) <mark&seventhcycle,net> on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @08:02PM (#14313395) Homepage
      But what about imap???

      I want my pine support!

    • yahoo used to have free pop3. But they took that away when they realized they had no competition. Mark my words: Gmail will charge for pop3 in the near future.
    • And yet Gmail has no facility to retrieve email from *other* POP3 accounts, whilst Yahoo and Hotmail have had this service for years (admittedly I haven't used either service for awhile, so they may have changed). To me this seems like a huge oversight given Gmail seems to be targetted as some sort of email centralisation service (hence the huge space, search functionality, etc), so being able to check other accounts (and obviously grab the email) through Gmail seems like a no-brainer to me.

      The workaround

  • This article shows... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GWBasic ( 900357 ) <`slashdot' `at' `andrewrondeau.com'> on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:44PM (#14312868) Homepage
    This article shows that engineers of competing products usually respect each other. All too often this is lost when passionate people discuss why they like/dislike a product.

    • Re:This article shows... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jay L ( 74152 )
      This article shows that engineers of competing products usually respect each other

      Absolutely. When the HTML-in-email and I18N standards were being developed, we had people from AOL, Netscape (then a separate company), Microsoft, Qualcomm, and probably others involved, and we got along great. And remember, companies that are competitors on one front are often cooperating on another; AOL was working with Microsoft techies on interoperability at the same time we were suing their bosses.

  • Caught up? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SnuffySmith ( 780790 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:45PM (#14312876)
    Whatever early lead Gmail may have had in creating a next-generation email program, both Microsoft and Yahoo have more than caught up

    I've been playing with Yahoo! Mail Beta for a couple of weeks now, and as far as the interface goes, I'm not terribly impressed. It is essentially a desktop GUI email client fit into a browser window, and it does that well enough (though a little slow on my Linux and Mac boxes -- and they do warn you things may not be great on those OS's). Nevertheless, it feels to me like yesterday's ideas stuck in a new package.

    The great thing about Gmail is its interface innovation. Where Yahoo! Mail has always felt cluttered (and Mail Beta does too), Gmail really gets out of my way so I can just read and send email.

    I haven't used Hotmail, but from what I've seen, looking over other people's shoulders, they don't really compete with Gmail either.

  • B-O-R-I-N-G (Score:3, Funny)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:47PM (#14312890) Homepage Journal
    I was almost expecting him to say that after dinner, he broke out his Martin 12-sting and they all sang Kumbaya.
    • I was almost expecting him to say that after dinner, he broke out his Winchester 12-gauge and they all ran for cover.

      There, now it seems plausible. ;)

  • Bah! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JesseL ( 107722 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:47PM (#14312894) Homepage Journal
    My SquirrelMail installation has it all over all three of them!
  • Don't know if the situation has changed, but if you use an alias to send email to your Y! email account, the spam filters silently don't learn.

    I trained it with around 1500 messages and still "C*ck crazed sluts" still got through. So after much nagging, I finally got the response that messages that are sent to an aliased name aren't spam filtered.

    And how damn hard is it to add a naughty word filter? Seeing they failed me with spam guard, that leaves trying to bumble it with filters. You can only set up a sm

  • first thing that came to my mind (Score:4, Insightful)

    by El_Muerte_TDS ( 592157 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:55PM (#14312947) Homepage
    Dining philosophers.

    And what a surprise, a deadlock.

  • Did they feel OK after the meal? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by FishandChips ( 695645 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @06:56PM (#14312959) Journal
    Well, I am happy for them. Somehow, I doubt they eked out the evening on K rations and a quart of cider wiped down with a rag. However, in between congratulating themselves these gentlemen could perhaps have spared a moment for the many millions of folks out there for whom email means not megabucks in the bank and a cushy job but fraud, phishing and asphixiation by spam. The net needs new and improved email protocols, not (yet more) talk-talk from the Porsche-driving classes. Also, this journalist sounds a little too close to his natural prey. Perhaps he laced the after-dinner mints with a power emetic as a gesture, at least, of professional independence. We can only hope.

  • AJAX drag and drop email is becoming commonplace (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @07:03PM (#14312994) Homepage Journal
    AJAX based drag-and-drop email is becoming commonplace now. At this point it's a "must have" feature, and any web based email program that doesn't have it is going to look as if it hasn't been updated since 2004 :)

    Yahoo and MSN both have it now. Even the software that drives private email systems has it now. You've probably seen the screenshots for Roundcube [roundcube.net], and you've probably seen the screenshots and swf-demos [citadel.org] of systems like Citadel [citadel.org] and Zimbra [zimbra.com].

    The point is, Google was the big trailblazer here, but at this point, everyone is now on that trail. The bar has been raised and rich AJAX webmail has quickly gone past "innovative" and is now "an expectation." Meanwhile, Google is probably busy cooking up the Next Big Thing. We hope. :)

  • Gmail Corporate (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Rrrrob ( 884676 )
    Slightly off topic warning! What do you suppose would happen if Google introduced a corporate server version of Gmail? Would it crush Exchange?

  • Chefs? (Score:5, Funny)

    by yeremein ( 678037 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @07:23PM (#14313123)
    Who else read the title as "3 Email Chefs Come to Dinner"?

    I had a picture in my mind of Iron Chef.

    Today's ingredient is... (drum roll)

    SPAM!!

    (A can of Spam is unveiled amid lights, smoke, and dramatic music.)
  • Even though I use and love gmail for my private email and dabbled with the new and improved Yahoo mail, I still can't see using either for my work email.

    -No on the fly spell checking (I fell to my knees and gave thanks to the lizzard when the Thunderbird 1.5 beta came out)
    -No filters and user defined folders on Gmail. Searching it fine, but seeing which emails come from developers for 15 different projects, product managers, business partners, or DQA at one glance is essential for me.
    -I want to be able to d
  • ...what was served for dinner?

  • One feature I need in GMail is this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @08:21PM (#14313526) Homepage
    One feature I need in GMail is this (and I hope someone from Google is reading). I want to have several mailboxes under the same signin name. In other words, I want bar@gmail.com and quux@gmail.com both show up when I login as foo@gmail.com. If they share the same storage quota, I don't care. What I do care about is that emails are in the same mailbox, and when I reply, the reply comes from bar@gmail.com or quux@gmail.com correspondingly. I'd use one address for people who I trust, and another for people who I don't trust with a different set of filters for each group.

    This one feature would allow me to abandon native email clients for good (aside from firing them up do back up my email from time to time).

    • Re:One feature I need in GMail is this (Score:5, Informative)

      by Abcd1234 ( 188840 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @08:39PM (#14313664) Homepage
      Actually, this is already possible. Any email that is of the form myname+stuff@gmail.com will go to myname@gmail.com. So, you can use myname+spam@gmail.com for all your untrusted sources, and just myname@gmail.com for everything else. Then, filter on the To: line and apply appropriate labels, and voila! Problem solved.
      • Thing is, I don't want this to be easy to defeat. Someone with a perl script could just strip the stuff after "+" and go directly to my mailbox. Then there's also a risk that someone may want to use a funky email client which has no clue that "+" in the email address is a valid character.
    • You may be able to do that by signing up for 3 gmail accounts and using filters to forward them; there is a feature to change the "From" line. You could also use plus addressing to accomplish what you're going for.

  • Gmail. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TheUncleD ( 940548 )
    The coolest new thing i've seen in Gmail is their implementation of AJAX in the autocompletion of address book names and other goodies in the system. Makes for easier emailing.
  • The meal started as a lovefest for Gmail and Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond 'agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail.'

    It sounds like somebody hired a GNAA troll to write this article, but thank god it didn't end up with Kevin Doerr "doerring" Paul.

    -- n

  • "beta" status (Score:5, Insightful)

    by muel ( 132794 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @09:51PM (#14314107)
    What's funny is how the reps from Yahoo and Hotmail ribbed Google for its "beta" status, but when you think about it... that's truly one of GMail's best features.

    Think about it, GMail users--how much trouble was it to get a username you LIKED? In fact, even to this day, there are still a lot of usernames that aren't duped or that require adding a stupid numeral suffix like 666. All because spammers and hordes of username thieves didn't jump on board--hell, they couldn't. I say, stay in "invite-only" beta as long as you want. It's not hard at all to get an invite if you want one, and it keeps the riffraff out.

  • I wonder if the dinner ended with a touching monologue by Spencer Tracy about the subtle complexities of facing one's racist upbringing, as a teary-eyed Katherin Hepburn glazed over in the background...

  • Cranky users (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NaDrew ( 561847 ) <nadrew@gmail.com> on Thursday December 22, 2005 @03:05AM (#14315470) Journal
    FTFA:
    The men reported similar pressures: cranky users of Web browsers with tiny market shares demanding that their browsers be supported, while not appreciating how much work is involved.

    How about just coding to standards? Why is that so hard to get? I use a Web browser (Opera) which conforms to those same standards in what it will accept and how it renders; all you (email chiefs/chefs) need to do is send me standards-compliant data. I'll take it from there. Leave the proprietary browser-specific workaround crap back in 1999 where it belongs.

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