A Piece on the Webmail Wars

Hotmail will not be left behind. This is according to Microsoft spokeswoman Kathleen Callaghan, as reported in the Washington Post.

Microsoft spokeswoman Kathleen Callaghan said she had not heard of any free accounts getting more storage. (this is a response to reports that some hotmail free account members have indeed seen their storage increase from 2mb to 25 mb)

But she did confirm that the company has plans in the works to beef up Hotmail: "Part of that will ensure that storage won't be an issue," she said. And a Microsoft vice president, Yusuf Mehdi, said last week that users will see a ton of innovation from Hotmail and Microsoft's other communication services over the next year.

(Bold comments in parentheses are mine).
Google is really shaking up the webmail landscape, and this is all good for the consumers. If it is not already obvious in this blog, I am strongly betting my money on Gmail, since it is the most revolutionary webmail among the three. Even with Yahoo's recent improvement, Gmail still offers the best feature set. The only problem is it's limited availability. If hotmail is serious about not giving up a big chunk of its webmail market share, they should deliver a better hotmail before Gmail opens to the public. By better I mean three things, in order of importance:

• faster response,
  
• new features that will match or top that of gmail's,
  
• and larger storage.
  

Speed is one of the two key factors why Gmail is able to deliver the new paradigm that it promises. Google's legendary data searching capability is of course the other piece of the puzzle. Why would then one choose searching over sorting when the search is not speedily done?

Features: Gmail is the first webmail to use a sorting paradigm that goes beyond your ordinary hierarchical file-folder metaphor. This is a huge improvement in organization and management of email, because it removes the limitations of the file-folder system, where a file (email) can only exist in one folder. In fact I can discuss Gmail's great feature set in a whole article (which I'm dong next), but unfortunately it is not as good as actually experiencing it yourself. Once a user experiences Gmail's features, he/she may find it difficult to go back to his/her old webmail.

Storage: The reason why i put this last is because in reality Google's 1GB is overkill at this moment, that Yahoo and hotmail (should they choose to match Yahoo)could get away even with a tenth of Gmail's offering. As all of them have said, they are just putting the storage issue out of the table. This is of course a usability point o view, the marketing effect of a huge email storage is another issue, as we have just saw with Gmail.

To conclude; maybe just like the rest of Gmail's early adopters, i will honestly say that the 1GB storage is what made me want a gmail. The feature set is the reason why I am sticking