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
- Gmail screenshot from Google (scroll down on this page)
- Karanbir Singh is accumulating sources
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?
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.