What if Gmail goes paid?

Posted by Abhijith as Uncategorized

What if Google starts charging for its services? Or for that matter if a Microsoft-Yahoo merger creates just 3 major players in the email/instant messaging/search industry(AOL being the other) leading to a situation most suitable to introduce paid services?

All industries go through the phases of acquisition/mergers/consolidations and then shoring up of prices. In fact, there was a time when online services almost went paid, with even Yahoo towing that line for its mail service, only to back off at the last moment(1998/99/2000 I guess). I remember seeing a newspaper ad announcing that they would still continue to be free to use. The logic was that new mail providers would keep coming up, so charging for mail will drive users to those that offer them free of charge. My friend who had an account with usa.net lost it, because he didn’t want to pay for it, now usa.net is a ‘professional’ paid email service.

But Google was founded for that very cause, so to say - ‘Don’t be evil’… So it won’t make sense if they do start demanding money for everything. I am slightly paranoid having lost my hotmail account once because of inactivity about 10 years back. Those were the days of the dialup and new kiosks. I clearly remember pledging to create one account on all major websites, having lost a few attachments and emails. Today those forwards are still doing the rounds making me feel like an idiot for cringing over the emails then.

As we associate ourselves increasingly to Orkut, Facebook, Myspace(the latter two which I don’t use) and services provided by the conglomerates, there is an ever present danger of the unexpected happening. Many are already predicting the downfall of Google.

Whatever happens, I’m just not ready to lose my email account again.

first posted at http://abhijith1729.blogspot.com/

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April 7, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

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