My preferred mail client is mail.app. Call me crazy, but I don’t like having to use the browser every time I want to see my mail, and while backing the mail up to mail.app every once in a while might be enough for some people, I enjoy having offline access to my mail all the time. Alex, my partner-in-blog, exclusively uses Gmail. Each of us have been trying for months to get the other to switch, but with no success. Still, we look forward to the day when an email product will arrive that smoothly syncs an offline mail client with an online one (mostly because our frequent arguments make us look incredibly nerdy in front of our not-so-technologically-inclined friends).
All that being said, it is Microsoft that first approached the smoothness we seek. The following is from the Windows Live Hotmail press release of May 6:
“• Outlook Connector…will enable people to view and manage their Windows Live Hotmail account from Outlook for free, with full contact, e-mail and e-mail folder synchronization.
• Mobile: Using Windows Live Hotmail for mobile…customers can access their e-mail when they are on the go on a Web-enabled mobile phone or PDA. In the future, Windows Mobile® customers will receive a richer online and offline Windows Live Hotmail experience with Windows Live for Windows Mobile, which will ship with Windows Mobile v6.”
Any Gmail user must admit that if I had just quoted a Google press release, they would be fairly excited. I know that Alex and I would be, at least. Even if this isn’t a threat to the supremacy of Gmail, as the Web Worker Daily article claims (and many other articles like it written in the past few days), mustn’t this necessarily change the way we think about email? Even if Gmail continues to dominate the online mail sector, this kind of change must force a reaction from Google. This, at least, is what one would hope.
Competition breeds innovation, which breeds further competition, which breeds further innovation and so on. Capitalism. The last thing we want is for one email provider to monopolize the field, which would necessarily result in a reduction of the impetus for innovation. But do these principles apply in the world of Web 2.0 and beyond? Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopolized the oil industry by vertically integrating the modes of production in the oil industry. Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central, MTV, CMT, VH1, and Dreamworks, provides a good example of a horizontally integrated coroporation. But what do you call Google’s recent purchases of YouTube.com and DoubleClick? What is the industry relationship between these two companies other than they are on the internet and add to Google’s massive and amorphous depth. Take a look at the google apps website to get a sense of what I am talking about:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/
In the Web x.0 of the future, what is the relationship between competition and innovation? The dynamics of web integration are not straightforward, and it is probable that the legal parameters of this integration are even less so. It will be interesting to see if U.S. antitrust laws have what it takes to go up against a company with an enormous amount of power that doesn’t even require its users to pay. In the meantime, I’ll be rooting for the underdog.
Posted by Jake Levine 