The failed execution of Gmail

It is hard for me to recall a web product more hyped up than Gmail. As you all know Gmail is Google’s free web based email service that gives users 1000 MB of free storage in exchange for having targeted ads displayed that are relevant to the email the user is reading. At the time of the Gmail announcement I wrote about how I thought that Gmail was a stroke of genius since Google “changed the rules” of competition in the web based email market. Before Gmail it seemed as though the basis of competition between Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail were not features but how well they could drive traffic back to their portal pages. Neither product had innovated much. When Gmail entered the service promised to flip this market on its head and it changed the basis of competition back to offering what users wanted: more storage space, better spam filters, an easy to user interface, and a fast interface.

I hate to say it, but it appears that Google blew this one big time. Yahoo! today announced that they will be offering 100MBs of storage to its current users shortly and essentially unlimited storage to pay customers. Google simply took too much time between announcement & public launch and they have allowed the competition to react and remove the pain points that would have prompted people to switch. How long before Yahoo! integrates their search capabilities into their free mail offering? Assuming the media storm settles down how long before they use Overture to offer contextual ads in emails for users? Google seems to have forgotten that switching email addresses is a painful thing to do, and in order to switch, the product a user is considering switching too had better be substantially better than the incumbent… well Gmail is substantially better than both Yahoo! mail and Hotmail; but it appears those days are numbered and it may well be just another email service when it launches.

NOTE: If anyone at Google reads this… please think about the pain of switching email accounts and build in a simple utility to import mail and contacts from other services!