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May
9
There is a market for start-ups that provide only an interface for existing email. For people who are willing to pay for (cheap) storage of their email and for bandwidth. Users will be able to migrate from and to such services without needing to copy huge amounts of email to their new email provider.
The Background
It’s no secret that the inbox paradigm we use today wasn’t designed to handle today’s volume of communication. Several start-ups have ideas to fix this, notably Xobni and Xoopit. Others want to go deeper and rethink the email client. Their biggest barrier to their entry is that data stored with an existing email providers (esp. webmail) is impossible to get at, short of copying that entire data. Zenbe, for instance, is an email client startup that is importing email from other POP3-enabled email accounts (including Gmail) to its servers.
The Opportunity
I’ll admit this is far-fetched, some way into the future, and has a relatively small target audience.
If users were to move their existing email into a database in an online storage service like Amazon’s S3, then several email clients could access this data, perhaps even simultaneously. If a user chose to move from one email client provider to another, the data itself - email, contacts, calendar, tasks - would stay intact; the new client would only have to create a new index for that data, and the old index could be deleted.
For users with email addresses from their own domain (such as rahul at rahulgaitonde dot org), even the email address would remain the same. The user would only pay Amazon for the storage and the bandwidth; the email service is still free, typically ad-supported. You could even use IMAP and access this from a desktop or mobile client.
The Upside
Innovation: Start-ups will be free to “fix” the traditional idea of an email client without having to worry about storing or importing tons of email.
Data ownership: Since the storage of is distinct from its interface, the user has far more control over their data than with today’s webmail services.
The Downside
Market size: The notion of having to pay for email storage seems anachronistic today. Most users also don’t care about what client they use. I contend that there will still be sizable numbers of users willing to pay, enough to make such an email service work.
Loyalty: While it is easier for such start-ups to acquire new customers, it is also easier to lose them – the cost of moving to a new interface is almost zero.
Failure point: Should the online storage service experience downtime, email will be unavailable.
Really a nice idea!
and having gone through this and the post about “moving to an online life”… i would like to know your comments on the gmail drive software. it uses ur gmail account as a drive on your system.