The Hot Web Wars....

My friend today invited me for what she called the Friday Lunch - obviously lunch on a friday, but an event for socializing and getting to know new people. So with the intention to meet new people I did oblige. Talking techonology over the lunch table is the least of my preferences. But with a few nerds working for a software major you dont expect to discuss What brought about the downfall of Sachin and Lara. Thankfully, the topic today was about the web wars launched by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Something that is atleast a lot spicier than the Channa masala that I had.

Well a lot was debated about the interface and the options that each of the players offer. One thing that can be assured from MSN is its features with the best usability experience. What once used to be the unique selling factor of GMail was the 1 GB storage. When it was introduced that was something really attractive. Hotmail back then was offering only 2 MB and Yahoo around 25 MB. So it was indeed a big deal. Infact I signed up for gmail primarily as backup so that I do not have to store local copies of important emails - which altogether will start the problem of managing and backing them up. But the big players were soon to catch up. Of course, they definitely cannot match the new comer owing to their exorbidant userbase. But yet they still managed to catch up. The whole idea is to get market share and Google had a solid business model in terms of targeted ads which fetches them revenue.

If you do searching on the web you will find - based on what most sites claim - that hotmail has a 33% share, yahoo 30% and gmail a mere 4%. The remaining being all other internet players put together. Given that Yahoo and MSN are closing in a lot of what Gmail had to offer, its highly unlikely that Google will pose any threat to MSN or Yahoo. Then why all this - because each player wnants to tap the remaining market share and of course increase revenue through their ad models.

Will all these marketing work? Does it really make sense in changing your email provider ?Well if introspect a little this is what I get. I use my email for a lot of things. It has close to 300 contacts, all my subscriptions , notices (and eBills) from my telephone, internet, cable, insurance and power companies, bank and credit card statements, notifications from my apartment community and the like. Its totally ridiculous for me to move to another provider for some minor features without which I can live, afterall they never existed until now. Even if I assume that I am going to change at all of the above places still I have a problem.Whenever I make a purchase or something I give my email address. Probably a few months down the line, I recieve an email about some promotional offer which can be of interest. So I get to loose a lot by changing my email address and its an unnecessary pain. Its as good as changing your mobile number. I find that a lot of folks here still maintain the mobile number which they subscribed when they were in University for the simple reason that its difficult to let all the people whom you know that you have changed your number. Above all, one fine morning, I get an email from this gorgeous babe from College whom I have lost touch with for almost years now saying Hi buddy heard that you are in the US please do give me a call, blah blah which was definitely possible with me sticking on to the same email ID for about a decade now. I am sure that anyone who uses email extensively like me will be in the same shoes. Hence whatever may be the features offered by the other it makes little sense to change email IDs.

Back to the same old question. Then why are companies fighting it out. As I said, its because of two factors. One, to increase their market share in the untapped segment, two, to increase revenues through ads. Perhaps Google had their innovation here in targetting customers through specific ads based on their email contents. I am not sure if MSN and Yahoo are trying to increase revenues based on a similar model. If so, then the whole of the free webmails becomes a concern.

If your email is being scanned, then the service provider virtually reads all your contents. Sometimes you do recieve important information in emails which when read and used by third parties can cause privacy concerns. Add to this that there is no guarantee that the provider will not exchange extracted information with their clients for improving their business. Right now since only Gmail follows this model and has a very small user base it hasn't caused any major concerns, but as the user base grows its soon to get into issues. If you really want to understand what kind of privacy issues may arise I suggest reading a host of articles written by Scheiner in his cryptograms.

Looking at all this, I feel I am better off retaining my hotmail account as primary. However, using and exploring other email providers helps you atleast be active in such conversations. You definitely do not want to be the odd man out in a gathering !!!