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June 18, 2004
Rediff joins the 1 GB space war!
Google started the space war and others have started reacting. Google embarrassed other mail services by providing 1 GB mail space, while Yahoo had to control themselves by giving 100 MB. And before other Indian mail services could think about their next strategy, rediff came with a bang to save its millions of mail users – 1 GB space!
Where is the war heading? Is the late 90s scenario of the dot com boom and bust going to repeat? Or Google has something else on its mind for the near future.
This is my analysis of the situation…
First of all on the Internet everything is at your fingertips. You cannot hide things nor fool the browser for long with your paid mail services, and the communication today is so fast that people understand things before you even think.
The 2 main fundas of the Internet business are –
1) Community
2) Interactivity
for rest of the content people always have other media…nothing to beat the TV of course.
Yahoo was a search engine when started. They build their community first, then came on to give a service to the already existing community. It is simple to make your community to use your mail service than trying to build a community through mail service.
With the community it had build on mail service, it extended it horizon by introducing Yahoo Messenger - till date the BEST messenger on the Internet. The advent of Yahoo Messenger was of course a serious jolt to services like ICQ and IRC chats. Again Yahoo tried to make its community to use Yahoo messenger, than trying to build a community through messenger service.
Yahoo is in the Internet industry for decade now, and things are going perfectly, till Google launched its 1 GB mail space. What could be the logic?
Google knows it that building a new community, which Yahoo has built in a decade isn’t easy. And they also know that the Internet customers are the most disloyal beings on the planet. The only thing they could do is to bring the whole of already built yahoo community to their site. There is no point for Google to start a mail service with 5 MB or 10 MB space, when people are kinda happy with yahoo or hotmail. The best thing they could think about is to do something, which is beyond imagination - I GB mail space. It of course is mouth watering, so much so that people refuse to think whether they need so much space on the first place. It is people’s choice end of the day – and for me SIZE DOES MATTER. This Google would get at least get 50 per of the yahoo community in 3 months – that really is a BIG number.
What about the money part?
Let us take the next 2 years for now. Google surely will be having enough money to sustain for the next years, but in that time would have forced most of the other mail services to close down and end of 2006 – Google will emerge as a monopoly.
What would be Google’s next move?
May be a BETTER messenger than YAHOO! Once they get their community in place it won’t take much time for Google make their customers use their messenger. May be Google would say you can send MOVIES via GOOGLE in 5 mns!
Now the questions that would be running top of the minds for other mail services would be –
1) Should they continue with 5 MB – 10 MB space for the next 2 years, slowly and gradually lose their existing customers and die.
2) Should they invest more money and upgrade themselves to 1GB
3) And lastly should they shut down their services and sleep peacefully
According to me, I think the last option is the best one.
Posted by Kenni at June 18, 2004 03:32 AM