Gmail for Domains not Alone
Posted by Mike Bijon February 10, 2006
Gmail for Domains will likely turn out to be more expensive and have much more competition than suggested by Paul Kedrosky’s “Gmail for Domains: Oh-Oh Outlook”. Corporate bandwidth is still in short-supply and expensive. Microsoft’s Office Live doesn’t look to be a complete waste-of-space either.
Based on the amount of extra traffic created by the constant background refreshes of Gmail, I’m not so sure the economics of viewing email on a hosted, AJAX-enabled platform are all that good. The high costs of WAN bandwidth, in the US, and securing/filtering that traffic properly, will make Gmail for Domains much more cosly than most companies will initially expect. Nonetheles, the adoption rate of Gmail for Domains probably won’t be slowed. Any reaction to speed or cost issues will likely be after-the-fact, with a near-complete lack of attention paid to security and bandwidth by most SMBs.
The launch of Microsoft’s Office Live and what looks to be a decent hosted-email, -SharePoint/storage, -CRM platform will provide a good amount of competition for Gmail for Domains. The interface may be too-complicated, but the added collaboration features and Office Live’s resemblance to the already familiar Outlook, Outlook Express, and HotMail should make it very competitive. Of course, Microsoft’s graphic-laden interface is bound to be even more bandwith-hungry than Gmail but, again, that will just sow user-unhappiness and not slow adoption.
Mike Bijon: I'm a development manager and technologist for a smart, small marketing strategy company, 
