Google's Gmail 'Not a hoax'

 

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By Steve Malone

Posted on 2 Apr 2004 at 10:24

These companies will want to respond soon as they will want to take as much wind out of Gmail's sails as they can with their rival offerings before it steals the market. That said, there is unlikely to be a mass migration from Yahoo and Hotmail users to Gmail as many casual users are satisfied with their existing accounts and anyway it's too much of a pain to inform everyone of a change of email address. What they won't want though is to be seen to be laggards in the forthcoming three-way battle for searchers.

Also likely to be damaged is the online storage industry, who just saw their entire business model blown out of the water unless they can top the 1Gb Google offer.

By stepping outside its core search engine business into the area of 'user services' in such a dramatic fashion will do the company no harm at all as it limbers up for an IPO. The fact that the announcement was made on 1 April and set the web alight over whether or not it is true will also be seen as a bit of PR genius on their part. We here were proud to be part of it. For sure, the sleepy backwater that was web-based mail has suddenly been transformed.