Google Mail (GMail) — Good Strategy?

So, turns out that the announce­ment of "GMail" is not really an April Fool's hoax. Come to think of it, it even makes busi­ness sense when you look at the fea­tures they will offer, and the brand clout of Google in gen­eral, which will surely hurt Hot­mail to an extent.

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.

  • lever

    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!

  • / snip­tools

    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.

  • Jay Car­tright

    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!

  • flamie

    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

  • Edward

    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.

  • man­nings

    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.

  • John

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

  • GM

    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.

  • Edward

    The plot thick­ens. GMail is hit­ting up trade­mark issues.

  • http://advocare.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_advocare_archive.html#108129797227673777 Blog Bloke

    The Google-God's (NEW) Strategy

    I'm read­ing a lot of posts express­ing excite­ment over the new Gmail ser­vice that is forth­com­ing from Google. Yes, I know we geeks get all tingly when it comes to inter­net search intu­itive­ness, con­text, rel­e­vance and a gig of free stor­age space, BUT w…

  • John

    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?!

  • http://advocare.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_advocare_archive.html#108145199781508514 Blog Bloke

    Google's Gmail Spammed Again

    So besides being accused of steal­ing the "Gmail" name, now Google has even rein­vented the word "deleted". The plot thickens…

  • Wahooo

    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.

  • zecg

    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.

  • / snip­tools

    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.

  • / snip­tools

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

  • nor­cal­win­dows

    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.

  • nor­cal­win­dows

    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."

  • / snip­tools

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

  • wenda

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

  • / snip­tools

    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

  • Prof C Chattoraj

    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,

  • / snip­tools

    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

  • / snip­tools

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

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

  • who­knows

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

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

  • dionysus_canticle

    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.

  • http://ineedyou Wowow­illy carriaga

    Im look­ing to my freind [email protected] she insert­ing a pic­ture to

  • Pnkcalla

    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