Sunday June 12, 2005

IMHO: Google's free email service.

Okay....first things first. Let me say it loud and clear that this is not about bashing Google in any way (so that I can save myself from trouble). I love them and respect them as much as you do. This is all about sincerely appreciating them in not only what they do, but how smart and suave they are in the way, they do things. Having said that, let me ask you this...

While we are all rushing with joy of getting a free/personal email id with 2GB space at Google, do we ever think why on earth would Google give us such a vast space, and that too for free? What does it actually give them in return ? What exactly are they getting back from us ? or let me put it this way..

What could be the worst damage that you could possibly do to Google by using their own free Google email service? And if I say, "deleting all your emails and folders, and keeping it empty or to a bare minimum", (thinking that you are being a good googolian's corporate citizen by helping them save money on purchasing/maintaining storage and servers) that, in fact will actually be hurting Google's strategy and will do more damage to them in the long run, in attaining its grand plans for its email service ?! Not sure about you but, I certainly believe so. And here are my thoughts.....

If you think where one could possibly find answers to most of the questions that were asked in this world, answers being in partial or full or state of being in close proximity to the right answers that we are looking for (in a very broad sense) It is most likely lying idle in somebody's Inbox or folders, at any given time. It could be our own inbox/folders sometimes except that, we dont know/remember/realize/care for it!

Just think for a second of how we all use our emails and email folders. We receive a piece of information as an email :

1. If we find it irrelevant or not being useful, we'll delete it right away.
2. If we find it useful or if we believe it will be useful to us someday, we'll religiously create folders and save it hoping, it will be handy someday.
3. If we're not clear about the information that we receive, we'll clarify/refine them, and again we'll save them safe.
4. Most of us (if not all) believe that we have deleted all the junk/unwanted emails and have saved only the important ones that we need.

Now think about what is Google's primary business btw ? What do they need to do their business going ? What is their basic raw material ? IT IS THE DATA. It is that heaps-and-heaps of, loads-and-loads of, volumes and-volumes of data/information out there on the web, which they search it, and then index it, sort it, slice it and dice it, and make anything meaningful and relevant out of it.

Simply put, any kind of data will be an useful raw material for Google's business. In Google's world, there is no such this called unwanted/junk data. They can still sort out all the so called unwanted data, club them together and serve it to someone who is looking out for it. In real world, at any given point of time, there is always a need for any kind of data. Data being useful or not, is totally relative to the context of what one is looking for.

Now coming back to Google's email service, by giving us a 2GB free space for us and for every individual person on this planet and by evangelizing that nobody needs to worry about deleting the emails anymore, GUESS WHAT ? they have just recruited us to work for them for free, to be their content (data) providers! We all are going to be their content providers by saving our emails to them in their hard drives so that, all their sophisticated API's and smart algorithms that they develop, will work on all our email contents, extracts only the relevant information that they need and serve it to someone else who is in need of it!

Remember when Google came up with the idea of Google email service first, said it will be different in someways and also something about sharing ? And all the buzz that happened when they announced it initially ? I think, this is what they were saying which is, "We will give you free email service/space. But in return, we'll be using your contents , we extract the information that we want, filter out the stuff that has your identities and then serve the rest to the ones who are in need of it, thereby potentially making a business out of it".

Somewhere we got mixed up as if Google in interested in running profiles on users and their personal identities. We got carried away with the stories that they might post our privacies and identifies out on public. I think we failed to understand what Google was trying to say. It is all THE DATA that they care about, and not by making money out of users profiles or identities.

The beauty of giving us a lot of space in their data centers as an email service is that, they dont have to worry that much in doing all the late/overnight crawling on the web to get relevant information as they go forward. All our email folders (probably in millions/billions now ?) themselves are a gold mine for them. Since the user community is growing like crazy for them, they can sit back, relax and keep digging all that contents we store in their servers.

So the next time when we look at Google for answers to our questions, we'll get 10 different/relevant/somewhat generic answers that will suit most of our needs except that, we ourselves don't know/remember that one of it is an abstract presentation of what has been lying idle in one of our own folders all this time! Something which we don't keep track of it anyway because we dont have to worry about what have in the first place and second, there is always Google for us in getting all the right answers that we're looking out for!

Though we all equate Yahoo, Hotmail and Google as more or less the same way to some extent because they all provide us free email accounts and tend to believe that they all are competing among themselves by increasing the disk space, I tend to believe that Google's strategy may be quite different from others. Yahoo and MSN primarily provide us free email services so that we'll get hooked onto their portals/accounts and thereby hopefully making them as our ISP's. But Google not only scares it's competitors by taking away their userbase to it's own free email services, but it could also plan on making some sense out of our own email contents and thereby making some business out of it! Something Yahoo and MSN may not be thinking about.

And...one more final guess. So next time when you run out of your 2GB space in your Google inbox, you don't have to worry that you'll get a notification saying that you need to clear up some space to accommodate new incoming emails (like how other ISP's do) but to the contrary, mostly you might get a notification saying that, they will be increasing your space from 2GB to maybe 3GB or so! Because your contents/data is more important to them more than what it is, for yourself!.....you see what Iam saying ?! Absolutely no doubts, they are brilliant! Hats off to them.

Having said all that, I have a few confessions to make. Whatever I have said so far, is all purely out of my own head with absolutely not empirical evidence/data to back up my story. Well it's only a story indeed because, my intentions are not to say something profound but, to say something interesting in getting me started on blogging (this is my very first blog post). I dont have a Google email account for myself, btw ;-)

more to follow.
Ananda ( Jun 12 2005, 11:10:00 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [10]