Two years ago, Mike Musgrove of the Washington Post noted that the number of free services in Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail were being cut back as MSN and Yahoo shifted their emphasis to focus on fees for premium services.
It's already a bit quaint to see $20 buying you all of 10 megs of storage. And more than a little silly to hear all the squawking today about GMail's ads, which, as we continue to point out, would pay for a FREE service that offers 100X as much storage as Hotmail's $20 fee bought you two years ago.
Unsurprisingly, in the intervening two years, consumer interest in these services has only strengthened due to their power and portability. Free web-based email only appeared to be "waning" because the feature set wasn't worth the price. Now that the tradeoff is getting more favorable (thanks in part to declining costs for storage space), the ubiquity of web-based mail seems assured.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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