While I expected computer data storage, and thus mail storage, to continue to expand, I didn’t think the next leap was going to be to unlimited storage. Yet, apparently Yahoo is making that move for all users.
While this is cool, I wonder if storage is a huge competitive difference with the major mail services already offering 2+ GB of storage? If you’re a solid Gmail user, would you leave for Yahoo Mail due to the storage? Techcrunch has an analysis on if this makes Yahoo Mail the best product.
There’s a great historical quote from David Nakayama, the Yahoo group vice president of engineering:
“I remember getting in a room to plan our RocketMail launch over a decade ago and worrying that our original plan of a 2MB quota wasn’t enough, and that we needed to be radical and DOUBLE the storage to 4MB per account! It’s ironic that I routinely send and receive individual mail attachments bigger than that now. Our total capacity for mail accounts back then was 200GB for all of our customers. At Yahoo!, we’re now receiving more inbound mail than that every 10 minutes.â€
I think that this primarily has to do with advertising and the old product differentiation strategy. All of the webmail options out there seem to offer relatively equal attributes, so how do you make yours pop if you’re one of the big guys (Yahoo, GMail, HotMail)?
In truth, this strategy is probably aimed at acquisition versus current relationship management for Yahoo!
If I’m a newbie to the email market, I would be apt to register for webmail that has “unlimited storage” versus one with 2 MB’s because the latter doesn’t hold much meaning for me.
For the average consumer, and potentially the larger target market, the “free” sound is what matters most because honestly…anyone who uses that much data space probably has a solid professional email account grabbing up most of their emails anyways.
Do it yourself too. Don’t waste time paying someone to do it for you.