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2005-02-21

Is G-Mail good? 

Got the following question from my Dad, and figured a reply was worth posting here.

Tom
As I recall you were beta tester for G-Mail. Is it any good? Should Mom and I sign up? IF it is free, how do they make money?
I got an invitation from them this weekend.
Dad

I've had an account on Google's g-mail since their early beta testing last year. To be honest I haven't used it very much, as it's yet another place I have to check for new messages.

What I have seen doesn't seem that particularly better than Yahoo's free mail service. Google does have a larger mail box, 1000 MB vs Yahoo's 250 MB. But Yahoo has more integrated services, like calendar, groups, virus scanning, etc.

At this point I wouldn't make any particular recommendation one way or the other for Yahoo vs G-mail, unless you're trying to protect a particular user name.

These days I'm using Mozilla's Thunderbird, for most of my e-mail and Yahoo as a secondary.

If I decide at some point that I don't like Mozilla's Thunderbird, I may direct more of my soot-n-smoke.com e-mail to g-mail and give it a better testing.

As for how does g-mail make money, the short term answer is they sold a whole bunch of stock last year. The longer term answer is that they will probably sell search keyed advertising when you search your e-mail. I suspect that they'll also offer various premium services much like yahoo does.


# posted by TomS : 11:49 AM
0 comments

2005-02-11

Microsoft in decline. 

Ever since my visit to Comdex in 1999, I've noted that the buzz / feel / smell around Linux and the open source movement is very reminiscent of the early days of Microsoft and Windows [circa 1985]. Evidently I'm not the only industry watcher that seems to think that Microsoft isn't doing as well as it once was. I tend to agree with Michael Malone's recent article that there is a faint smell of rot about MS. I see definite similarities between where Microsoft and Longhorn are today with where IBM was in 1987 with it's ill-fated attempt at industry remonoplization, the PS/2 and Micro-Channel Architecture.

If nothing else Big Bad Bill and company have lost the coolness that is the hallmark of the up and coming in the tech world. The real innovation is not in OS upgrades, security patches and the pathetic myth that is digital rights management. [Does anyone else remember copy protected software flop of the 1980s?]

Cool today are Slashdot, Google, Mozilla/Firefox LAMP and the blogosphere.

# posted by TomS : 4:58 PM
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