The Biz of Coding

Google — Anyone can Signup for GMail Now!

by Ujwal Tickoo on February 14th, 2007

Google's Blog announces the availability of GMail for all. There is no need anymore to get an invite through someone who already has a GMail account. Cool! Associate Product Manager David Murray wrote this note:

 Gmail sign-ups are now open worldwide! No more waiting for someone to invite you—just create an account directly at www.gmail.com. What better way to share the love with the people you care about than with Gmail chat with <3. And Gmail is available in over 40 interface languages (though <3 needs no translation).

From a webmail market share perspective, last September Yahoo Mail had 50% of the 500 million online web mail market.

  GMail created competitive stir when it started and offerred 1 GB of space in mail accounts. This caused Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail to quickly expand the free space offerring. GMail also has a Search driven interface different from Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail.

Though some people prefer the GMail way to email, I still start my day with good old Y! Mail and keep GMail for managing online subscriptions.

GMail was also the first to offer an inbuilt chat feature with GTalk. Overall, Yahoo! Mail leads the Web Mail space though some folks argue that GMail suffers from metrics issues caused by its Ajaxian interface. It is the same problem that Yahoo! has had with Myspace showing higher monthly page views traffic metrics (over Yahoo!'s) recently. BusinessWeek published an interesting article on this issue titled Did MySpace Really Beat Yahoo?

Whatever GMail's general availability means for Google, Yahoo! and MSN on the market share side – competition is very good for consumers! The coming months will mark the real world test for GMail. This is a clear chance to prove how much consumer traction Google has got in webmail – beyond all the hype around several of its products that never really took off.

POSTED IN: GMail