All your email in one basket.
February 20th, 2008 by Grant in: Business, TechnologyAn interesting consequence of a Microsoft/Yahoo merger would funnel nearly three fourths if the U.S. email accounts through one huge data processing monster. What this means is that email accounts and a host of other personal data would be held by one company; something I suspect the U.S. government might squawk at.
Interestingly enough, 46% of internet users in the U.S. have email accounts run by Yahoo, Microsoft holds 27% and 29% use Google’s Gmail.
Personally, I’m not sure I’m crazy about having three quarters of the email accounts held by one company. In essence, there’s too much personal data being held in one place.
Then there’s the possibility of monetizing email. For instance, a Microsoft/Yahoo based email host could have the power to start charging money for every email sent or received; much like sending text messages through your cell phone provider.
I think the chances of this are actually fairly remote, and I’d hope the government would step in and regulate such a large, controlling stake. On the other hand, this could very well spark new innovation and new competition to add value to email… whatever that may be.
Personally I’m not crazy about a Microsoft/Yahoo deal, and I think Microsoft is taking advantage of a battered down market to gobble up competition.
Time will tell…
Tags: mergers | microsoft | yahoo
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February 20th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
What’s wrong with companies charging for email? You’re using their machines, their software, their bandwidth.
Sure, the users wouldn’t like it, but internet users shouldn’t expect anything to be free.
Also, competition would surely drop the prices to zero, or very close to it. Would I pay $5 or $10 a year for my gmail account? In a second.
February 20th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
@jon,
Internet users already expect to get something for free… information, and on top of that, communication (email), albeit subsidized by ad revenue.
You wouldn’t bat an eye paying Google $5-10 per year for a gmail account… fine.
What would you say if they wanted $0.05 per email sent and $0.05 per email received?
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Personally I think that they match up well. For the most part they compete in different markets but could complement each other well.
Yahoo has a great online email, Microsoft’s is pretty okay. They both have okay search engines, so maybe they can make one good one.
Maybe I am going off on a tangent, but…
Really I keep hearing a lot about how Yahoo sucks at searching and sucks at ad dollars but I really think they will slowly turn that ship around. Yahoo doesn’t and shouldn’t complete with Google in the same arena, and maybe analysts should start seperating the two company directions. Yahoo has really began gearing itself towards good content. Google could give a rats @$$ about content. They are all about getting you to content.
Anyway at Yahoo, look at their sports writers, right now I feel as if they may be the best in the country. Their finance area is excellent as far as free content goes, although I am going to shank the Motley Fool for putting up the same articles over and over again. I think they are building the content to truly become a serious player in the news and article world. That content attracts customers and customers attract ads. The newspapers all across the country are struggling, and what better way to centralize talent and content than to put it all in one well used place.
To me this where Yahoo is going, and I think it is the right direction, what better way to bring people to your site than with your own content. In the long run, I think it will be best for them.
Bringing back to the idea of a merger with Microsoft, together I think they could be a pretty powerful company that can truly create a great combination. That being said, Yahoo needs to be what Yahoo does well if this merger is going to be profitable. Otherwise, Microsoft will screw this up, BADLY. The last thing the existing Yahoo users want is MSN.com, they want Yahoo, they want the categories, the good content, the My Yahoo, and yellowpages. Don’t make Yahoo Microsoft’s Google (did that sentence make sense), Google is a different animal.
February 24th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
I’m more concerned about Google’s invasion of consumer privacy than the MS/Yahoo merger. Take, for example, Google Maps with street level views. You can see my car parked at the now-ex-bf’s place. You can’t read license plates off this but I’m not certain that sharpening up the image would be impossible. We know from the overhead views of the house how recent the aerial views were taken - some point after my neighbor planted sod, so it’s within the past year.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Not sure if you’ll see this now, but..
“Internet users already expect to get something for free… information, and on top of that, communication (email), albeit subsidized by ad revenue.”
Right, but they shouldn’t. Isn’t it a little strange that you can find nearly anything you want (like software packages rivaling what you would have had to spend hundreds of dollars on) for free on the internet, when people will spend $6.95 to play Tetris on their cell phones?
“What would you say if they wanted $0.05 per email sent and $0.05 per email received?”
I’d say that they wouldn’t because someone else will come out and charge $10 a year. That would be suicide for their business. It’s why nobody is charging for basic email packages now.
Now sure, there is certainly a cost to switching addresses, but it’s not that difficult. And a smart company would offer a $50/10 year deal or something to give customers a service they could count on long-term.
March 1st, 2008 at 6:44 am
I think we’re going the other way, aren’t we? Things are going free, not more expensive. Especially anything like a utility, which is effectively what email is now.
@Jon, I agree it’s weird, and all us Internet-entrpreneurs suffer the consequence, but then again we have near zero startup costs, which is why there’s such insane competition that pulls the price down so low. As you allude to in your last point, you need to give something premium to charge. E.g. Gmail without ads, say. But remember over time ‘premium’ will become free too, so you have to keep innovating.