Four startups ready to change the face of email
In ten years, an internet eternity, web-based email has only made token improvements, moving from Hotmail to Gmail. Meanwhile, instant messaging and social networks have rapidly developed. — Four new startups, all of which came …
Context & Ripple Effects
Web-based email has spent a decade moving from [[a:none|Hotmail]] — still running at megaservice scale as of early 2006 — to Gmail, with little else changing, while instant messaging and social networks iterated rapidly. That stagnation is the opening these four startups are betting on.
The incumbents are not standing still on growth: Gmail's popularity among students was credited in August 2007 as the key driver of college adoption of Google Apps Education Edition, and its invite-scarcity launch even spawned an eBay resale market. The challengers are attacking the one major web category that hasn't been rebuilt around people and conversations.
First-order effects
- Gmail and Hotmail face direct interface-level competition for the first time in years, from products designed around the social behaviors users learned on IM and social networks rather than folders and attachments.
- The four startups must win users inside an entrenched habit — email addresses and inboxes are sticky, so switching costs sit with the challengers, not the incumbents.
Second-order effects
- Gmail has already proven that a single compelling feature set can pull whole institutions aboard via Google Apps Education Edition, giving incumbents a playbook: bolt social and contact intelligence onto existing mail rather than cede the inbox.
- Scarcity-and-invite distribution remains a live option for challengers — the Gmail invite resale market showed demand itself can be marketed before a product is broadly open.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the inbox stops being a standalone storage-and-send product and converges with messaging and social networking, forcing every major webmail provider to decide whether email is a communication hub or a legacy protocol wrapper.
- A wave of inbox reinvention also raises the fragmentation question: multiple proprietary front ends over shared email infrastructure could split user experience along service lines for the first time since Hotmail standardized free webmail.
The trend: Webmail is shifting from a decade of token improvement toward socially integrated communication hubs, as startups and incumbents alike race to rebuild the inbox around people instead of messages.