HotMail Ups the Ante
We've heard lots about the Mail Wars, as they were, and now there's another army entering with big guns. Hotmail has announced that they will now boost the storage limits to 250MB for the free accounts and 2GB for the $19.95 annual subscribers. This sneaks by Yahoo! with their 100MB for free offer. Similar hikes are soon to come from AskJeeves as well.
One interesting observation made in a News.com article:
Indeed, Google's initial steps into storage increases countered the industry's trend to charge extra for more memory. Over the past few years, Yahoo and Hotmail have both taken steps to decrease memory in hopes of convincing free users to become paying subscribers.
Amazing what a little disruptive force applied at the epicenter can cause in an industry as a whole. This is, really, no different than what we say in the Web Hosting Wars when more and more space was provided to users that needed to host their 300K of web site files in their 2GB buckets. At least e-mail continues to accumulate.
This raises one important question: could GMail have trouble getting off the ground once invites start free-flowing? Consider the forces at work. GMail sports this new mail interface, which in many respects breaks the "rules" of e-mail (yes they are rules since everyone is used to the way mail used to work) and required adjustment to a new interface paradigm. GMail has this potentially scary, privacy-issue-ripe advertising supported model that's already raised flags, eyebrows, and even litigation. Competitors have had the power of hindsight to react appropriately without adding the specter of big brother (aside from the one's that were there before).
Let's wait and see.