Hotmail to Rival GMail ??

[Nemesis]

Take a look at this

http://www.msn.co.uk/HotmailUpgrade/Default.asp

[Richard M]

Not likely, now that a lot of you have seen GMail...

Just following in the steps of Yahoo i guess.

[MadGamer]

Originally Posted by Nemesis

Take a look at this

http://www.msn.co.uk/HotmailUpgrade/Default.asp

Nice One Hotmail

Looks like it, I was a bit surprised when I logged into my Yahoo account to find it was now 100meg storage. Keepin up with th Jones' is good for the customer in this case.

[aliferste]

Hotmail just has a horrible look when I switch between it and gmail .......no way is it a rival

[punky]

Nice of Hotmail to do it.

I reckon though, it will have a significant impact on GMail, because I can check it through Outlook, but I can't, officially with GMail (although someone has done a POP3 server emulation for GMail already. But wether it works, or Google manage to block it, we'll have to see.)

I think people would go down to 1/4 storage if they can use it free in Outlook though.

God knows how much this is costing MS though. 170m users, haing 250meg each? I don't know how much server hard disk space costs bulk, but even if it is half the price of regular client storage, it would still work out like this:

They need (170m x (250/1024)) = 41,480,000 gb
They already have: (170m x 2.5/1024)) = 415,039 gb
They need to acquire: (42,500,000 - 4,250,000) = 37,230,000 gb

Let's assume cost is half the regular end user cost, so £50 per 250gb =

(37,230,000 / 250) * 50 = £7,446, 000

7.4 million quid, if my maths is correct, which it probably isn't. Actually, that is peanuts to them, but felt bigger in my head.

[Richard M]

Yes, but the majority of users won't even use 1MB.

[aliferste]

Originally Posted by Richard M

Yes, but the majority of users won't even use 1MB.

Im considering when it opens officially to start storing all my word documents, journal articles and other documents in a gmail account.....I could then use the search facility to find the ones I want when I need them

[Derek]

I wonder if they'll improve the spam filtering.

I've got two hotmail accounts. One is pretty good at filtering the crap out but the other still pumps it directly into the inbox despite being on the same settings.

The stranger thing is a lot of the messages are (almost) the same in box accounts.

[Mal]

All the spam that I get, won't take me over the limit now!

[dilli-theclaw]

Originally Posted by aliferste

Im considering when it opens officially to start storing all my word documents, journal articles and other documents in a gmail account.....I could then use the search facility to find the ones I want when I need them

Just as long as they don't have anything personel in them.... I must admit I plan to store quite a bit of stuff on there too. But it will be in password protected .rar format.

[Gareth]

It's definitely a case of MS playing catch-up to GMail. They didn't need to bother when Yahoo offered 6MB instead of Hotmail's paltry 2MB, but GMail's offering is so much larger that it's forced MS to react.

After sending and receiving numerous mails to and from my new GMail account (thanks again Richard M ) over the past couple of days, I still think GMail has better functionality than Hotmail. Maybe it's just cause it's still new, but I prefer the GMail way - I seem to be forever clicking to access next page after next page after next page to get to mails. GMail certainly seems to have taken considered usability very seriously

[Richard M]

Micro$oft employee sez:

Hotmail is aggresively moving to make storage a non issue any more (in light of gmail and yahoo's recent offerings).

http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/archive/...24/164306.aspx

[aliferste]

Plus the fact when you click on a link in hotmail there is that rediculous bar across the top of teh screen