June 15, 2004

Sending Ripples Through The Pond

Even though Google's free email service, Gmail, is still in its beta stage and unavailable to the general public, it is already affecting its competitors. Yahoo! announced today that it is raising the storage limit on its free acconts from 5 mb to 100 mb and its attachment limit from 2 mb to 10 mb. Google offers 1 gig of storage.

While Yahoo! still offers an upgraded account with 2 gigs, they have acknowledged the obvious: no one is going to be making money from offering more email storage from now on. I'll be shocked if Hotmail doesn't follow Yahoo!'s lead in the next few weeks. It's inconvenience to switch email accounts, but 998 extra megabytes of storage and a spam-free account (at least for the first days) does a lot to quell inconvenience.

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