Thursday, June 24, 2004
Email wars Google v Microsoft
Well it had to happen, Microsoft’s hotmail is fighting back with bigger inbox’s a whopping 250mb of space. Doesn’t go halfway near Google corporations 1000mb of free email but I bet you it probably won’t stay that free for long. But certainly, this has brought Hotmail back to good old days of when it was a fantastic web based email service. Microsoft have done exceedingly well in increasing the size of the mailbox to 250mb. However, now with this increase who is going to buy the premium services? But then again with all the spam that seems to find its way into my hotmail mailbox it won’t take long to fill 250mb!!!
Read about it further in this story taken from www.pcworld.idg.com.au which is the website for a brilliant Australian Information Technology magazine
Hotmail in-box storage goes to 250MB
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
24/06/2004 10:52:39
The domino effect Google started in April when it announced plans for a free e-mail service with 1G-byte of in-box storage continued Wednesday, when Microsoft promised to boost Hotmail in-boxes to 250M bytes from the current 2M bytes.
The storage increase for Hotmail will be rolled out starting in July in the U.S. and other countries, said Lisa Gurry, director of Microsoft's MSN Internet division. "The landscape has changed regarding users' need for extra e-mail storage and we don't want storage to be an issue for any Hotmail user," she said.
Gurry declined to reveal the geographical rollout schedule but said Microsoft plans eventually to extend the bigger in-boxes to all 170 million Hotmail subscribers. Asked if Microsoft was responding to Google's 1G-byte e-mail service, which is still in a test phase, Gurry declined to address that service specifically, saying only that Hotmail is responding to customer feedback.
Yahoo last week announced plans to boost the in-box size for its free Web-based e-mail service, from 4M bytes to 100M bytes.
Other enhancements to the Hotmail service include the ability to send attachments up to 10M bytes in size, up from a previous e-mail maximum size of 1M-byte including attachments, and the cleaning of viruses in infected outgoing or incoming e-mail messages, she said. Previously, Microsoft scanned all outgoing and incoming Hotmail e-mail messages, but didn't clean them, she said. All Hotmail users worldwide will receive this feature in July, she said. Microsoft provides this antivirus service in partnership with Network Associates Inc.'s McAfee unit. As it has done in the past, Microsoft will continue providing antispam features in Hotmail, in partnership with Brightmail Inc., she said.
As providers of Web-based e-mail compete to retain subscribers and win new ones, they should focus on features beyond in-box capacity, said Allen Weiner, a Gartner Inc. analyst.
"We're having a mini-war in the free e-mail area right now, and I think the war has been focused in the wrong direction," he said. "For each of the major free e-mail providers to compete by offering more and more space doesn't seem sensible to me. ... Giving users more storage space doesn't really do much except create more clutter."
All the extra in-box space will be of little use if the users aren't given tools to categorize and retrieve messages, which is why Microsoft is doing the right thing with its plans to develop broad search functionality that covers the Web, e-mail and documents in PCs' local hard drives, he said. Then the e-mail service should be complemented with other Internet services, such as online calendars, he said.
Microsoft also announced a new fee-based e-mail service called MSN Hotmail Plus, which will offer users 2G bytes of in-box storage and the ability to send 20M-byte attachments for US$19.95 per year. Previously, Hotmail users could buy extra storage on top of the standard 2M bytes that the free service features at different price levels, starting at US$19.95 per year for 10M bytes of in-box storage and a maximum attachment size of 3M bytes up to the highest tier, which at US$59.95 per year offered 100M bytes of storage and a maximum attachment size of 20M bytes. Hotmail Plus users also get the benefit of not receiving graphical advertisements.
Yahoo has opted to do a similar thing by eliminating its tiered extra storage offers for its Web-based e-mail service, offering instead one fee-based plan of US$19.99 per year which gives users 2G bytes of in-box storage.
Yahoo increases e-mail storage capacity
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
16/06/2004 09:30:34
To Yahoo, size matters, specifically as it relates to the storage capacity of its e-mail users' in-boxes.
Yahoo plans to announce on Tuesday that it is increasing significantly the storage capacity of its free and fee-based Web-based e-mail services. Those who use the free service will see capacity increase from 4M bytes to 100M bytes, while users of the fee-based service will get 2G bytes, the company said.
In addition, Yahoo is simplifying pricing for its fee-based e-mail service, which is called Yahoo Mail Plus. There will only be one price for the service: US$19.99 per year. This represents a discount for all subscribers to the service.
The increase in storage will be rolled out globally between Tuesday and the end of the year. The new price will be available to subscribers when their current annual agreement ends, Yahoo said.
"We're announcing these improvements to our service, with a refreshed user interface and a storage increase. Our goal is to provide a full-featured service, and now we've taken storage off the table. People don't even have to think twice about it," said Terrell Karlsten, a Yahoo spokeswoman.
Limited storage in Web-based e-mail services has been a headache for many users, who see messages sent to them get bounced back if their in-box is full. This forces users to constantly delete messages from their in-box to make room for incoming ones.
But in April, Google rocked this market when it announced it was developing a free Web-based e-mail service called Gmail with 1G byte of storage capacity, enough room to let users forget about the issue of inbox storage. Gmail still isn't generally available, but Yahoo's move is a clear reaction to the imminent arrival of that competing service, said Marcel Nienhuis, an analyst at The Radicati Group.
By responding to Google's move with this increase in storage, Yahoo will give a good enough reason for most of its current users to stay put and not move over to Gmail, he said. "Anything above 50M bytes is plenty of storage, so providing 100M bytes for free is very generous and pretty attractive. Most users will be very happy with it," Nienhuis said. "The 2G bytes for the fee-based service is pretty much unlimited storage for all practical purposes."
It's hard to get a user to change Web mail accounts, because switching involves the hassle of notifying all contacts about the new e-mail address and getting acquainted with a new service, he said. Plus, users grow roots into Yahoo mail, because it's integrated with a variety of other Yahoo services, such as calendaring, address book, photo album and instant messaging, he said.
Also it remains to be seen how comprehensive and effective Gmail's set of features will be once it becomes generally available, particularly in areas such as spam filtering and virus protection, which are areas in which Yahoo has put much attention, Nienhuis said.
What Google has started with its announcement of Gmail is the removal of storage as a premium feature for Web-based e-mail services, Nienhuis said. Until now, providers of Web-based e-mail services such as Yahoo and Microsoft had used storage as a feature for users to upgrade to their fee-based service, Nienhuis said.
"Increasing their storage limit is what people have been paying for premium service for the past few years and you won't see that anymore. That's over, and that's a pretty big change," he said, adding that he expects Microsoft to soon make an announcement similar to Yahoo's.
Yahoo is also announcing other enhancements to its e-mail services on Tuesday, including:
-- a redesigned user interface for both services;
-- for users of the free service, an increase in the maximum size of a single message from 3M bytes to 10M bytes;
-- an improvement in the back-end system powering the search function of the two e-mail services, which should result in faster query results; this search feature is an existing one, and lets users search the full-text and subject lines of the e-mail messages in their in-box by keyword;
-- the availability of 50 million e-mail handles or names that had at some point been claimed by users but that have been dormant for years;
-- the removal of all graphical ads from the fee-based service; these ads will continue to exist in the free service; the only ads that will appear in the fee-based service will be text-based ads promoting Yahoo offerings only
Users in the following markets will receive the redesigned user interface and the increase in free storage to 100M bytes on Tuesday: U.S., U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.
Read about it further in this story taken from www.pcworld.idg.com.au which is the website for a brilliant Australian Information Technology magazine
Hotmail in-box storage goes to 250MB
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
24/06/2004 10:52:39
The domino effect Google started in April when it announced plans for a free e-mail service with 1G-byte of in-box storage continued Wednesday, when Microsoft promised to boost Hotmail in-boxes to 250M bytes from the current 2M bytes.
The storage increase for Hotmail will be rolled out starting in July in the U.S. and other countries, said Lisa Gurry, director of Microsoft's MSN Internet division. "The landscape has changed regarding users' need for extra e-mail storage and we don't want storage to be an issue for any Hotmail user," she said.
Gurry declined to reveal the geographical rollout schedule but said Microsoft plans eventually to extend the bigger in-boxes to all 170 million Hotmail subscribers. Asked if Microsoft was responding to Google's 1G-byte e-mail service, which is still in a test phase, Gurry declined to address that service specifically, saying only that Hotmail is responding to customer feedback.
Yahoo last week announced plans to boost the in-box size for its free Web-based e-mail service, from 4M bytes to 100M bytes.
Other enhancements to the Hotmail service include the ability to send attachments up to 10M bytes in size, up from a previous e-mail maximum size of 1M-byte including attachments, and the cleaning of viruses in infected outgoing or incoming e-mail messages, she said. Previously, Microsoft scanned all outgoing and incoming Hotmail e-mail messages, but didn't clean them, she said. All Hotmail users worldwide will receive this feature in July, she said. Microsoft provides this antivirus service in partnership with Network Associates Inc.'s McAfee unit. As it has done in the past, Microsoft will continue providing antispam features in Hotmail, in partnership with Brightmail Inc., she said.
As providers of Web-based e-mail compete to retain subscribers and win new ones, they should focus on features beyond in-box capacity, said Allen Weiner, a Gartner Inc. analyst.
"We're having a mini-war in the free e-mail area right now, and I think the war has been focused in the wrong direction," he said. "For each of the major free e-mail providers to compete by offering more and more space doesn't seem sensible to me. ... Giving users more storage space doesn't really do much except create more clutter."
All the extra in-box space will be of little use if the users aren't given tools to categorize and retrieve messages, which is why Microsoft is doing the right thing with its plans to develop broad search functionality that covers the Web, e-mail and documents in PCs' local hard drives, he said. Then the e-mail service should be complemented with other Internet services, such as online calendars, he said.
Microsoft also announced a new fee-based e-mail service called MSN Hotmail Plus, which will offer users 2G bytes of in-box storage and the ability to send 20M-byte attachments for US$19.95 per year. Previously, Hotmail users could buy extra storage on top of the standard 2M bytes that the free service features at different price levels, starting at US$19.95 per year for 10M bytes of in-box storage and a maximum attachment size of 3M bytes up to the highest tier, which at US$59.95 per year offered 100M bytes of storage and a maximum attachment size of 20M bytes. Hotmail Plus users also get the benefit of not receiving graphical advertisements.
Yahoo has opted to do a similar thing by eliminating its tiered extra storage offers for its Web-based e-mail service, offering instead one fee-based plan of US$19.99 per year which gives users 2G bytes of in-box storage.
Yahoo increases e-mail storage capacity
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
16/06/2004 09:30:34
To Yahoo, size matters, specifically as it relates to the storage capacity of its e-mail users' in-boxes.
Yahoo plans to announce on Tuesday that it is increasing significantly the storage capacity of its free and fee-based Web-based e-mail services. Those who use the free service will see capacity increase from 4M bytes to 100M bytes, while users of the fee-based service will get 2G bytes, the company said.
In addition, Yahoo is simplifying pricing for its fee-based e-mail service, which is called Yahoo Mail Plus. There will only be one price for the service: US$19.99 per year. This represents a discount for all subscribers to the service.
The increase in storage will be rolled out globally between Tuesday and the end of the year. The new price will be available to subscribers when their current annual agreement ends, Yahoo said.
"We're announcing these improvements to our service, with a refreshed user interface and a storage increase. Our goal is to provide a full-featured service, and now we've taken storage off the table. People don't even have to think twice about it," said Terrell Karlsten, a Yahoo spokeswoman.
Limited storage in Web-based e-mail services has been a headache for many users, who see messages sent to them get bounced back if their in-box is full. This forces users to constantly delete messages from their in-box to make room for incoming ones.
But in April, Google rocked this market when it announced it was developing a free Web-based e-mail service called Gmail with 1G byte of storage capacity, enough room to let users forget about the issue of inbox storage. Gmail still isn't generally available, but Yahoo's move is a clear reaction to the imminent arrival of that competing service, said Marcel Nienhuis, an analyst at The Radicati Group.
By responding to Google's move with this increase in storage, Yahoo will give a good enough reason for most of its current users to stay put and not move over to Gmail, he said. "Anything above 50M bytes is plenty of storage, so providing 100M bytes for free is very generous and pretty attractive. Most users will be very happy with it," Nienhuis said. "The 2G bytes for the fee-based service is pretty much unlimited storage for all practical purposes."
It's hard to get a user to change Web mail accounts, because switching involves the hassle of notifying all contacts about the new e-mail address and getting acquainted with a new service, he said. Plus, users grow roots into Yahoo mail, because it's integrated with a variety of other Yahoo services, such as calendaring, address book, photo album and instant messaging, he said.
Also it remains to be seen how comprehensive and effective Gmail's set of features will be once it becomes generally available, particularly in areas such as spam filtering and virus protection, which are areas in which Yahoo has put much attention, Nienhuis said.
What Google has started with its announcement of Gmail is the removal of storage as a premium feature for Web-based e-mail services, Nienhuis said. Until now, providers of Web-based e-mail services such as Yahoo and Microsoft had used storage as a feature for users to upgrade to their fee-based service, Nienhuis said.
"Increasing their storage limit is what people have been paying for premium service for the past few years and you won't see that anymore. That's over, and that's a pretty big change," he said, adding that he expects Microsoft to soon make an announcement similar to Yahoo's.
Yahoo is also announcing other enhancements to its e-mail services on Tuesday, including:
-- a redesigned user interface for both services;
-- for users of the free service, an increase in the maximum size of a single message from 3M bytes to 10M bytes;
-- an improvement in the back-end system powering the search function of the two e-mail services, which should result in faster query results; this search feature is an existing one, and lets users search the full-text and subject lines of the e-mail messages in their in-box by keyword;
-- the availability of 50 million e-mail handles or names that had at some point been claimed by users but that have been dormant for years;
-- the removal of all graphical ads from the fee-based service; these ads will continue to exist in the free service; the only ads that will appear in the fee-based service will be text-based ads promoting Yahoo offerings only
Users in the following markets will receive the redesigned user interface and the increase in free storage to 100M bytes on Tuesday: U.S., U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.
# posted by Peter Saville - IT Consultant @ 1:08 AM 
