With all the hype of 1 GB email from Google and SpyMac, the 100 MB email storage from Yahoo!, I often wonder what the hell is the Redmond giant doing. Maybe they didn’t read the news that I read and are not aware of the competitor’s storage space offerings.
Well, it turns out that they do after all.
In response to rival e-mail services enticing customers with high capacity storage, Microsoft’s MSN unit will soon announce its intentions to follow suit, BetaNews has learned.
Redmond executives have been mulling over how to respond to the storage frenzy, and are set to unveil a plan that will go into effect in July.
Although still in beta testing, the launch of Google’s free Gmail service heated up the competition by offering customers a whopping 1GB of e-mail storage. Yahoo! fired back this week by boosting customer inboxes to 100MB and unveiling an updated user interface, which Microsoft called “quite good.”
“We have been intentionally quiet over this period, as we formulated our plans, and waited to see the Yahoo response, feeling it would be best to see how strong Yahoo’s counter would be before going public with our own,” Blake Irving, corporate vice president of MSN’s Communication Services group, told employees.
Microsoft hopes that by giving customers enough space, it can move the media focus away from storage as a key selling point and reduce the emerging threat posed by media darling Google.
“We are going to respond in a big way and will eliminate email storage as an issue for our users,” said Irving.
E-mail is not the only area in which MSN is feeling pressure from competitors. Microsoft has been developing and refining its own algorithmic search engine, and plans to launch MSN Newsbot — a service similar to Google News — by the end of the year.
Source: BetaNews
So let me guess how much Microsoft will offer. Er, 20 MB perhaps? MSN Hotmail has the most email accounts I think, millions and millions, to offer 1 GB would be quite unrealistic. I’ll wait and see. Meanwhile, there’s Google’s Gmail for me. In case, you’re wondering what the hell is my email address, you can reach me at dew(at)beconfused_dot_com
Love to hear from you.
Also, I am wondering if anyone has a suggestion for a new layout. Provide me with the picture with good resolution and I’ll build it up. I’m trying to build other types of layout. 
Possibly related:
whoever said competition wasn’t good?
Ya, it’s really good for so many of the hotmail users. But the hotmail’s biggest weakness is that it’s slow as all hell to use – after disk space, I think speed should be priority. Although, that’s not microsoft’s style
btw, Yahoomail’s working fast again – so i have no complaints
by pketh (Jun 19, 2004 at 12 PM)as for layout suggestions…
by pketh (Jun 19, 2004 at 12 PM)Maybe when my new super simple(tm) design is up, it’ll inspire you? lol
I personally have a hotmail,a few yahoos, among others. lol Each company is always looking for something to draw in users. I have to admit though the new space on my main yahoo account has been nice since I had alot in it. Since I just got my domain I will be making a new account from my site. This will be really cool for me. I think this layout is really cool. I am myself trying to come up with a layout too! I hope that you find some inspiration though! If you want to go to my current site you can go to http://kittytronica.speyhouse.com since I haven’t put anything really on my domain (kittytronica.com) yet. Thanks for the welcome in surmunity though!
by Kitty (Jun 19, 2004 at 3 PM)pketh: hotmail is fast actually, considering all the junk that comes with the mail i am trying to view. MS sends so much javascripts, tables, divs etc, it’s ridiculous and not narrow-band friendly, that’s the main reason why it seemed so slow. i prefer gmail’s simple interface, it loads much much faster.
by Mr. Dew (Jun 19, 2004 at 3 PM)kitty: thanks for visiting, welcome to surmunity. you can migrate to your new domain without much problems i think, just use back movable type. [my site is runs on WordPress]