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Google Mail (GMail) -- Good Strategy?

April 1, 2004 Views (15,834) /  Comments (26) /  Trackback (2) / Digg/Share


Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and president, says the idea for Gmail — the internet search heavyweight’s new free e-mail service — came from a Google user complaining about the facilities of existing e-mail services such as Yahoo! Mail, Mail.com and Microsoft’s Hotmail. The idea caught the attention of a Google engineer who thought it might be a good “20 per cent time” project - Google requires engineers to spend a day a week on projects that interest them, unrelated to their day jobs. “Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born,” said the company in a quirkily worded press release put out yesterday with an April 1 dateline that had many journalists (including this one) wondering whether this was another April Fool’s spoof. Gmail, however, turns out to be real.

Screenshots: What it looks like

Google Mail Screenshot
And here’re some other screenshots:

Key Features (What makes it different?)

As the screenshot above clearly outlines in true Google straight-speak, or as Jeremy enlists in his take on GMail’s features here, the differentiation strategy is simple:

  • Mega storage space, 1GB: All email services including Yahoo! and MSN Hotmail offer extra storage but for a fee (which quickly adds up.) That’s their revenue model, apart from some advertising that users have learnt to ignore. But Gmail aims to offer far more free storage space than its rivals — enough to store roughly 500,000 pages of text — making the need to clean out the e-mail inbox a far less pressing chore.
  • Smart Organization through Searching, not Sorting: The new service also represents quite a different approach to accessing the information stored in e-mail messages long after they were received. Gmail will automatically organise e-mail according to topic and allow users to search their e-mail — including sender, text and subject lines — in the same way they search the internet. Most e-mail services currently require users to sort e-mails they want to save into folders, and delete all but the most important. One exception is a recently released e-mail software add-in from x1 Technologies (www.x1.com) called x1 which, like Gmail, employs sophisticated search technology that makes it easy to find information in saved e-mail messages.
  • Contex-sensitivity: In addition, when Gmail displays an e-mail, it will automatically show all the replies to that e-mail as well, so users can view a message in the context of a conversation.
  • Simplicity: What they don’t mention (because they don’t need to) is that the GMail service, from the looks of it, will showcase the same minimalistic efficiency one has come to expect from everything that’s Google. This would be a VERY welcome respite from the image laden website of Hotmail for instance! Btw, has anyone figured out how to send plain text emails from Hotmail?
Outer Court has a fledgling and active stash of Gmail’s announced and upcoming features.

Google, a Search Engine, getting into Email? Why?

Simple. It marks the opening of a new front in the battle between Google and its main rivals. Think about it. It makes perfect sense as Google’s mission has been to organise the world’s information and make it useful and accessible to people. A lot of people’s information resides in their e-mail.

Another likely reason is that Google, which is expected to seek a stock-exchange listing later this year, is also keen to take the battle to Microsoft and Yahoo! which have both been beefing up their own search engines in order to attack Google’s prominence as a web search provider. Yahoo!, which previously used Google’s search engine technology, dropped Google as the default search technology provider for its US-based sites in February, while Microsoft has been investing heavily to improve its own search technology. GMail, and other related services for a full-fledged “portal” like Yahoo! or MSN, may very well be the strategy of Google.

Challenge #1: Privacy

Google faces a number of challenges as it enters the market for free e-mail services, and the company has left many questions unanswered. What better source to turn for such info than EFF itself, who is maintaining a growing repertoire of Gmail’s privacy based concerns.

Google has a tall order in reassureing Gmail users’ potential concerns [Register.co.uk] with its privacy policy.

Gmail will be supported by ‘contextually relevant’ text adverts that will appear in the margins of individual e-mails — rather like the advertisements that appear down the right-hand margins of Google search results pages. They emphasize that users’ e-mails will only be machine read and that no human eyes will be involved. Nevertheless, Google needs to be sensitive about this issue.

Challenge #2: Will it spread?

To avoid the need to add huge amounts of additional storage capacity immediately, Google plans to roll out the service to users who have signed up for the service via the Gmail website over some time, probably months. Even so, how quickly will it spread? Keeping the service on a separate website limits its visibility to potential users, especially now that it is being beta tested. Even if the service is eventually moved to the main Google home page, the company would face the significant hurdle of getting users to switch from their present e-mail providers. That’s not easy if your competitors are Yahoo! and Hotmail. Google has only its brand clout and its industry leading searching caliber to bank on.

Challenge #3: Monumental Storage Requirements

With 1 gig of email storage PER USER, we’re talking some serious math in terms of hard disk space.

Technically, this is a breeze. Just buy lots of disks. In a distributed fashion. This is where Google’s approach is remarkably different from its competitors. Those fractions of seconds it takes to return Google results is driven by a monolith network of PCs, all cheap and disposable at minimal expense if necessary. Read this interesting paper from Jim Gray on cluster computing, if you really care.

Logistically, this is a breeze too, if you understand the simple reality that not everyone will use 1Gb. Heck, it’s pretty hard to even get close! Especially if they limit the size of attachments. I’m a pretty heavy email user, and I only get about 30-40Mb of mail a month, so a gig of Google’s diskspace will give me a 2.5 year repository, even if I never delete anything. (Spam adds between 60 and 100Mb every month, so a decent spam filter will be important to them.)

Challenge #4: Google, show me the money!

Hah, this is where it gets interesting. No, it’s not a thorny road. The good folks at Google just really need to monetise their assets, and make more money out of search. They’ve probably got just shy of about 100,000 partially utilised servers all around the world…some of which are going to waste at any one time. And they desperately need more contextual reach in which to serve their adsense to increase advertiser clicks and revenue.

So they create a hosted email programme in their spare time, you know…for fun between coffee breaks. Donate us all a nicely load balanced bit of space on one of their many servers, and then serve adsense through our millions of daily context rich emails to monetise the whole thing, creating a nice revenue stream out thin air, extending their reach, and subsidise the whole thing. And Google suddenly goes from being a popular monolith that is used and abused daily by millions of anonymous web users going about their searches, to a monolith with a loyal tied in registered user base, and heaps of personal data, that no doubt will become a huge marketing asset.

(1335 Words | )

 
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Comments
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^1 lever said on April 5, 2004 9:22 PM:

Lack of privacy may be the price of *free* progress. Remember how lousy search engines were before others like Google and Teoma came along? Gmail as proposed could reorder the e-mail universe in the same way, and force Yahoo and Microsoft into a whole new round of catch-up. It’s a very exciting development!

^2 Shashank said on April 6, 2004 9:45 AM:

That’s right. Email usually also has a strong lock-in, if all my friends and acquaintances have my hotmail address (for instance) it is quite a pain to tell them all of my new gmail address.

^3 Jay Cartright said on April 6, 2004 5:06 PM:

There is an analysis of this problem from Rich Skrenta (creator of Dmoz) over here -
http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html

Good point about Google’s distributed computing, although this would indicate that GMail could also work on regular platforms!

^4 flamie said on April 7, 2004 11:23 PM:

The really clever bit is once you, as an individual, have a sufficiently large corpus of mail sitting on their servers and analysed and index, Google can infer a hell of a lot about you. And once you’re back on the main Google Search you may find that the ads you’re shown are relevant to Google’s overall picture of you, rather than the search you’re currently doing

^5 Edward said on April 7, 2004 11:31 PM:

I am not sure if all these new services are a good thing though. AltaVista is the case study for a search engine losing focus and then losing out. Hopefully Google can learn from their mistakes. I think the key factor will be the way Google handles the homepage design, as long as the new services are kept off the hompage so that it remains fairly consistent and search remains as the primary focus then they should be able to introduce them without to much risk.

^6 mannings said on April 8, 2004 9:39 AM:

Privacy will not be an easy issue. I don’t know what the fuss is about, yahoo mail already does contextual advertising. It’s not like someone is sitting there reading your email, the machine’s software scans your mail for some words, and does relevant advertising!

CNN has a good story about this mess.

^7 John said on April 8, 2004 1:48 PM:

if you worry about google email wonder what you’ll think of google getting into instant messaging?? neat site btw.

^8 GM said on April 8, 2004 10:11 PM:

Good analysis, but John Gilmore says it like it is about the TOS:

Read here:
http://craphound.com/gilmoreongmail.html

QUOTE: “Many spam-filtering services send copies of alleged spams to some central location. If they get N copies of similar messages, they declare it spam and publish the offending messages on the web. Google’s right to send your spam to such services gives them the right to send ANY of your email to ANYONE — for publication.”

Something to ponder.

^9 Edward said on April 9, 2004 1:18 AM:

The plot thickens. GMail is hitting up trademark issues.

^10 John said on April 9, 2004 10:15 AM:

The main problem with all this hyped up idea: you will not be able to permanently delete e-mail messages sent to your account. WTF?!

^11 Wahooo said on April 9, 2004 1:28 PM:

I will sign up for 1000 accounts and get a free terabyte storage system. I do not know exactly how the system will work, but there is enormous potential for abuse. Actually, just personal storage of large amounts of data is probably the least of the concerns. One could imagine a warez or pornographic distribution system based on small requests to a controlling site that then uses mail fowarding to deliver the content (thus pushing the bulk of the storage and bandwidth costs onto gmail). Spiffy.

^12 zecg said on April 9, 2004 1:38 PM:

I don’t understand how people can presume that it’s an april fools joke and don’t see how insanely profitable this will be. Among all the cries of “you’ll NEVER, EVER have to erase any of your mail”, the only thing missing is the “or we’ll kill you” suffix. Combine this with the “search-based, no browsing, all indexed, all the time” approach and there you have it - a huge, ever growing base of keywords for customized ads delivery per user.

It’s evil and I would never use it. Call it what you want, I’m just not sold to that particular feeling one gets when after a ten-mail long-distance breakup with one’s fiancee one starts getting ads for “Russian brides” services. I’m funny like that.

^13 Shashank said on April 9, 2004 10:14 PM:

Wahooo, interesting. As far as porn is concerned, don’t worry, that is not very difficult to take care of. People try to use Yahoo for the same purposes and there’re recourses a company to take to keep such folks isolated. It isn’t terribly effective, I admit, but it won’t really be a scourge. Signing up for a few accounts and then storing your files there probably ain’t gonna happen because Google will surely have attachment limits per message. Or something.

^14 Shanx said on April 17, 2004 1:10 PM:

Interesting: Jeremy Zawodny has some interesting questions to shatter some of the nebulous around Google’s future pie-in-the-sky strategy.

^15 norcalwindows said on April 18, 2004 10:53 AM:

So you have no problem with your emails being scanned and cross-referenced to your identity at some later date, and a profile being created about you. That is okay, its your right to give up your privacy, and if you go into it knowing that your gmail account will be used by marketers and government agencies to ‘get to know you better’, you will use it in a fashion that will hopefully protect you enough to feel comfortable. A major criticism of Gmail is taken care of by their “opt-out” policy…

But what about people who email you? They are not given an opportunity to opt in or opt out. Their missives to you are scanned because they are in your mailbox. Information is gleaned from their writings, and advertising (spam)can be sent to them based on their communications with you. Their privacy is completely exposed, and while you think it is easy to simply not accept the service, people you email you — or who you email — have an expectation of privacy that is not addressed by Gmail. Indeed, this expectation is not considered, or even thought to be valid by Google.

^16 norcalwindows said on April 18, 2004 10:55 AM:

Quote from Google’s privacy policy for Gmail:

“Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using Gmail, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country.”

^17 Shashank said on April 18, 2004 10:58 AM:

Here is an interesting take on using Google’s Gmail’s context sensitive advertising and turning it into the joke it deserves to be.. Smilie

^18 wenda said on May 28, 2004 7:30 PM:

How do I make a new email with either Gmail or mail.com on google please. Thankyou

^19 Shashank said on May 29, 2004 1:46 AM:

Wenda, Google is only rationing gmail accounts sparingly. You can apparently get some from ebay.com auctions, or through websites such as http://snipurl.com/gmailswap

HTH, Shanx

^20 Prof C Chattoraj said on June 13, 2004 3:14 PM:

It seems to be a good mail service from Goooooogle! I am eager to open an e-mail a/c .
to see its working ( especially two points:
1]privacy
2]antivirus for mail.
thank you,

^21 Shashank said on July 22, 2004 9:24 PM:

Google’s free Gmail has quietly added a feature that takes on its free e-mail rivals head on.

Since the weekend, Gmail — the for-free Web-based e-mail service that Google is still testing — has offered a way for users to import contacts from address books in Yahoo Mail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, and AOL’s Mail. Gmail also now can import addresses from Microsoft’s Outlook client.

Other new features rolled out by Gmail include the ability to create and append a signature to outbound messages, and support for Apple’s Mac OS X-native Safari browser.

The additions are just the latest in the back-and-forth battle that’s raged in the free e-mail space since Google announced Gmail this spring. Hotmail and Yahoo, for instance, have reacted to Gmail’s 1GB storage allowance by upping their user space as well.

More info:
http://snipurl.com/7xse

^22 Shashank said on July 28, 2004 12:04 PM:

Kevin Rose load-tested Gmail:
http://snipurl.com/82hm

Very cool findings. Some screenshots of Gmail getting maxed out as well.

^23 whoknows said on August 13, 2004 5:01 PM:

Who knows if it is good strategy but google mail (gmail) has its own share of issues,

http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/

^24 dionysus_canticle said on October 23, 2004 6:53 AM:

I’m a gmail user, and I love it. It blows its competition out of the water.Yes, you can permanently delete your mail. You just have the option of not doing so, and as far as google being exploited as a mass storage device, theres already a program which I have in my possession called gmail drive that adds an additional drive to your hard disk , when you open it in my computer it works just like windows explorer. The only draw back is that you cant put anything in that drive over 100 Mb. But who cares, you can split them into as many piece’s as you like and when you want the file back, put them back together again.

^25 Wowowilly carriaga said on November 13, 2006 7:33 AM:

Im looking to my freind whinalyn@gmail.com she inserting a picture to

^26 Pnkcalla said on January 10, 2007 8:16 AM:

The mobile newuser setup feature seems handy. All is simple until it requires to enter characters listed then i receive by text my invitation code. Problem, tiny letters make it impossible to re-enter, and impossible to get my invite code

 

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