For over a month now I have been critical of Google's execution of Gmail. Five weeks ago I went as far as to call the execution of Gmail a failure, and with today's announcement by Microsoft that Hotmail will now offer 250 MB of free storage I believe that Google has wasted a golden opportunity with Gmail. Here is why I think this is a big deal and what Google should have done differently.
Why this is a big deal - Unless you have been in a coma for the last few months you know that Google is going public. While the IPO price for Google's offering will be set via a dutch auction, the long term success of the company, and hence the stock price, will be determined by how well Google can compete with Microsoft, Yahoo! and other upstarts. The inability to effectively launch Gmail before Hotmail & Yahoo! could react shows that Google may be tech savvy, but potentially weak on strategy & execution. While being technologically superior to your competition will often sustain a company in its early days, when an industry begins to mature, a firms ability to market effectively, set the proper strategic direction, and execute on that direction become more important.
How this mess could have been avoided:
- One of the first problems with Gmail was that privacy advocates around the country went crazy over the idea of contextual ads in an email. First off Google should have been aware that privacy advocates might have a problem with this approach to email and they should have been better prepared. If they knew that privacy was going to be a concern, and given that the Google founders know Brad Templeton (The founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) they should have consulted with Brad and gotten the EFF on their side before any public announcement.
- Google has taken months to open this product to the public. While it is wise technically for Google to try and scale an application like Gmail in a controlled fashion, it is foolish given the market conditions. The company should have been more aggressive with their rollout, even risking bugs and outages, in order to get the product open to the public before Yahoo! and Hotmail could respond. Now that Hotmail and Yahoo! have raised their storage limits, one of the key points of attraction to Gmail has been removed, storage size.
- I have asked a few family members if they want a gmail account, and the first thing all of them have asked is "How hard will it be to switch from Yahoo!?". My response has been... "Surprisingly hard, since Google doesn't give you any tools to make the switch easier." Simply put, there is NO excuse for not having a tool to make switching from Hotmail and Yahoo! easier. Hell, given the 2000+ people at Google, the company should have taken 5 or 6 people and had them build a simple utility to extract email and contacts from these two services and load them into Gmail.
In summary, the email market was perfectly set up for Google to enter and dominate based on a great product offering. Delays in rolling out the product have allowed Hotmail and Yahoo to respond and really limit Google's opportunity to take over the email market. If Google wants to be a GREAT company they will need to really focus on marketing, execution, and strategy, and not always on technology.
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