by , 4:00 PM EDT, April 16th, 2004
Earlier this month, Google announced a new free e-mail service called Gmail. The service offers a Web interface and a full GB of e-mail storage, which will be needed, because Google will be storing your e-mail for ever, even when you "delete" it. BusinessWeek's Alex Salkever says that Gmail is rewriting the rules for online mail services, and that such a rewrite is a major threat to Apple's own .Mac. From BusinessWeek:
Anyone who hasn't heard about Google's bold, new e-mail product must have been hiding under a rock for the past few weeks. The folks at the Googleplex plan to offer free Web e-mail accounts with 1 gigabyte of storage capacity. That's hundreds of times more capacity than the current free offerings at Yahoo! and Microsoft's Hotmail.
It's not just the size that matters here, though. To pull off its plan, Google would have to build some extremely hardy software that can easily manage vast arrays of servers storing and managing e-mail accounts. It probably has already done so. Google is running a beta trial of Gmail with thousands of users and plans to have the service available to the public in the next few months.
Gmail has the potential to put the Web e-mail market on steroids. That, in turn, presents some interesting possibilities for Apple's own .Mac product. For $99 a year, .Mac subscribers get a veritable bag of goodies, including a .Mac e-mail account with virus protection, backup software, online file storage, and calendar-synching capabilities.
There's more information in full article at BusinessWeek.
That said, we are not at all interested in a service like Gmail. For one thing, Gmail will be parsing our e-mail to offer us targeted ads (with .Mac, you are paying to get an ad-free e-mail service, and that has enormous value for many people). Also, as we noted in the article, those e-mails will be stored "forever," and that just makes it even worse.
Though we have little doubt that the current management Google will not use that data against us -- Google has so far proven that it is among the "good guys" of the corporate world -- the company will eventually change hands. Microsoft has been rumored to want to buy it, and there are no doubt many other potential suitors who would love to own the world's largest search engine.
Even if no one company buys Google, however, it will eventually go public, and that inevitably means a change in management; it is far more likely than not that said management change will eventually lead to someone being in charge who sees the opportunity to sell that data, your e-mail, as far outweighing any ethical concerns.
No thanks. That works for some, but not for us.
Still, Mr. Salkever is spot on that Google's offering will cause pay services like .Mac to have to either enhance their own offerings, or lose customers. That's the free market at work, and we think that's a Good Thing™. Like Mr. Salkever, we are of the opinion that .Mac is overpriced, at least as far as renewals are concerned.