Malik
(6/15/04)
Give
and Take With Yahoo
Yahoo,
taking a hint from the massive appeal of the purposed G-Mail from
Google, has bumped up the size of their email accounts, effective
today. Yahoo, in a bid to keep the love and affection of the
populace has boosted their inbox size from 4 or 6 megs (newer
account had a smaller size than the older accounts) up to a much
more impressive 100 megs. This, in itself, is a definite
improvements considering how larger memory is coming at a far
cheaper price in today's world than it was when Yahoo's mail service
was started...although I will never understand the drop from 6 to 4
megs...
At
the same time, Yahoo decided to take a lot of their email addresses
that have simply not been used for years and free them up for new members
to register. This, much like the increase in size, is a
definite draw to bring in new customers.
All
of this, by itself is showing that Yahoo is definitely in the right
mindset to stay competitive in today's email market, but I've
noticed a new flaw that reminds me of Hotmail's worst feature...and
no, it is not their pathetic 2 meg inbox...which is pretty damned
lame considering the competition and that this is from the supposed
leaders of what is cutting edge; Microsoft. The flaw is that
it seems that the bandwidth has been knocked down a peg as the inbox
size was pushed forward. Considering I use my Yahoo email for
standard daily communications (I can't check the Geek-Asylum.com
email from work since my work computers are just not technologically
savvy enough to handle outlook...yes, I work in that amazing
of a workplace...so Yahoo would normally fit this requirement), a
major drop in connection speed and ease of use is a bad thing...a
very bad thing. I don't think I'm alone in noticing this
flaw...in fact I know I'm not alone as I watched several coworkers
face the same dilemma. It took me a whopping full minute to
open a single email (imagine how I felt when I found it was just a
damned email virus and realized I should have spent far less time
discovering that crap) after the initial 2 minutes to log in.
I don't have that much time to kill that I can waste 20 minutes to
check all my emails and to erase all those wonderful porn
offers...
Seriously,
if Yahoo wants to stay competitive, the offer of larger inboxes with
worse service is not going to get them far. I stopped caring
about my Hotmail account because it took to long to check my email,
not because of the small inbox...well, not just because of the small
inbox.
Malik
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