Email is Old News

First the battle was fought on the front of storage, and now it’s a feature war. Online email apps aren’t just repositories for email anymore.

They’re getting bigger, more data heavy and far more complex. They’re becoming custom built modern data centers manned by each individual who uses them.

It takes time and effort from users to get their email exactly the way they want it to function, and I think allowing users to customise their interfaces is a big hook.

The email market is pretty competitive amongst the big players. There are so many similar services available, and all for free. In fact, I don’t even bother to use the email addresses that came with this account. Everything that comes to me goes through Gmail.

Having used Gmail since it came out, I’ve used it to plan trips, coordinate projects and so on. It’s an easily searchable archive of my life for the past 4 or 5 years, so I for one am going to stick with it, even as Yahoo rolls out a rather attractive email platform that’s open to third party applications. In that sense, I don’t think that there will be much switching between email providers for the sake of new features. It’s more of these providers continuing growth by sucking in new users.

We’re seeing email being used very cleverly by Zentact as a base for a new kind of social network, but it’s essentially got a symbiotic relationship with the applications. If the catches on,  maybe sometime soon we’ll start seeing email providers start to build on their existing loyal userbase as a means to draw new users into the fold , or to steal other users from other providers with a Zentact style application of their own.