E-MAIL space war
Google Gmail's 1GB free storage offer has Yahoo! scrambling to do
better
IT IS hot out in cyberspace as two competing Internet giants slug
it out in a battle of services.
Two months after Yahoo! dropped Google as its search provider for
United States-based sites and launched its own technology, the
latter announced it was testing a preview version of Gmail, a free
web-based e-mail service and in direct competition with Yahoo!
Mail.
Yahoo!, once the leading search engine till Google appeared on the
scene, had been licensing search technology from Google since
1999.
Gmail dangled a luscious carrot. It was the first in the industry
to offer 1GB, or 1,000MB, worth of free storage space - 250 times
more than what the leading free e-mail providers, Yahoo! and
Hotmail, were providing.
In what appears to be a retaliatory strike, Yahoo! is upgrading the
storage space for its free e-mail accounts from 4MB or 6MB to
100MB.
It also underwent a facelift, with new features such as a search
bar that allows users to locate e-mail easily. This feature is also
found in Gmail.
Users who pay US$19.99 (S$34) a year for the premium Yahoo! Mail
Plus will get 2GB worth of space.
Mr Nitin Bhat, director for telecommunications research at
consultancy Frost & Sullivan, told The Sunday Times that the
face-off was probably a battle for advertisers.
'When you have a large customer database, you can segment them and
offer them to the right kind of advertisers,' he said.
The general manager for Yahoo! Singapore and South-east Asia, Mr
Niren Hiro, said the upgrade was part of its 'ongoing strategy to
compete effectively'.
Gmail accounts are now given out only by invitation. But it has
become such a hot commodity that more than 4,500 of the free
accounts are up for sale at eBay. A bidder paid US$63 for one such
account last month.
Assuming your average length e-mail, without attachments, takes up
2kb of space, Gmail can store 500,000 pages of e-mail and Yahoo!,
50,000.
But this is not enough to entice local undergraduate Hairul Naim,
who thinks the extra space will just result in more spam and junk
mail.
According to Mr Bhat, spam and junk mail will not be a problem if
companies put in place filters and software to protect users.
But there are privacy issues.
Gmail has come under fire because it intends to scan users' e-mail
electronically in order to match them to text advertisements.
Responses from the World Privacy Forum and dozens of other civil
liberties organisations indicate a general worry that this will
lead to further compromises with privacy.
Google's response is that the scanning is used only to deliver
targeted ads, and that all major e-mail services automatically scan
e-mail content for the benefit of users.
Mr Hiro declined to comment on the Google privacy controversy,
saying only that Yahoo! would not be doing the same thing.
Meanwhile, another e-mail provider is preparing to make its move.
Hotmail, a service by Microsoft's Internet unit, MSN, offers 2MB of
free storage, or 100MB if users pay US$59.95 a year.
When asked if Hotmail's popularity would be threatened by such
competition, MSN South-east Asia head of business development and
marketing, Mr Vincent Sim, said it was unlikely.
He did, however, say that Hotmail was always looking to improve its
service, and that 'there will be an announcement coming
soon'.
taken from
STI
