In this bloodbath happening between the email service providers we are the real winners. As far as i am concerned i gained a lot from it. My local disk storage space offerd to me is meagre 300 mb. But thankx to those sites i dont have to again forge new excuses to my administrator for getting more space.
Google has been the frontrunner in this race, both in terms of technology and the innovation. Google has mainly gained the advantage by being first in the market of search engine. So it has always been one step ahead of its competitors.
But did we realise why Google's Gmail came so late in the flourishing market of the email service. May be google had not precieved as the things would change so quickly in the comming years. It was happy in gaining supremacy in its search engine business. In the past year or so lot of developments have taken place.
1)Yahoo whose search engine was powered by Google till 2003 has purchased "Inktomi" a search engine technology provider which specilizes in algorithimic web technology . The Inktomi's search technology powers Amazon.com and Wallmart to name a few.Thus Yahoo is starting branding itself as destination for search.
2)Another development in search engine technology is the development of Microsoft's new Longhorn operating system. Longhorn monitors all of your activities Every file, every image, word document, mp3 etc and the information collected from these could make your search more enjoyable while you are browsing. Microsoft plans to ship its own search engine along with this operation system. And looking at the cult following of windows,just like the window explorer which has made most of the other browsers a history, same may be applied to the search engines existing now.
3)Upcomming search engines have learned from the mistakes of the Google, for example "mooter.com". It arranges the search results far more logically them what Goolge does. It has lot more added features along with that.
All the above and lot more other issues have forced Google to explore other areas of business to survive on the web. And inorder to maintain and increase its loyal base Gmail entry in email business has been one among them. And when Gmail offerd 1 GB space others too fell in line. Rediffmail is also offering whooping 1 GB space along with provisions of sending 10 mb file attachments.
This war for providing email storage has been a gift for us. Let us hope some more developments would take place and shower us with some more features.
But google is not giving space so easily. We may have to sacrifice our privacy. Google will be scanning our emails.The advertisers registered with Google would then use key words our private e-mail - and post the advertisemnts accordingly, for example if message mentions something related to computer, you may get advertisemts from the hareware companies.This has resulted the Gmail to get into a legal tangle with some senator of California.So it is better not to put the critical messages on Gmail. I am dumping my files on Gmail for storage purposes only.
But as long as we are getting the goodies I don't give a damm to it!!!