Indiatimes re-launches web mail - following the crowd… very late
I recently wrote about the ZapakMail venture being a terrible move by Reliance - a very high cash burn with not much value add. It just didn’t make any sense to do, and Alexa ranking and traffic figures confirmed my point. There’s not much value in providing a “local” flavor of web mail.
Now, Indiatimes has joined the bandwagon by relaunching their webmail offering. Apart from a flashy TV ad that really doesn’t mean much, their service boasts unlimited space and with dazzling new Web2.0 features.
I don’t care how good or catchy their TV ad campaign is and who they hired to make it, but this service is not going to catch on like wild fire - as depicted in the TV advertisement. Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Rediffmail (to some extent) - have been around for eons in Internet time, and have already spread wide and far.
The Indiatimes webmail service also features some supposedly new catchy and useful offerings. Apart from having unlimited storage space (something they should’ve done 18 months ago - to counter the traffic migrating to Gmail and then other unlimited webmail offerings) - they’re claiming to have useful features like shopping, purchasing air tickets, accessing Wikipedia and even playing games - all without leaving the webmail page!
Give me a friggen break!
Who in the world would want to do this… other than a random few people who click on it out of sheer curiosity. The team behind the Indiatimes Webmail strategy, have not only woken up 18 months too late (with their unlimited webmail size offering), but have also not understood the basic fundamentals of the mindset of the Internet user.
People access webmail to read and reply to email messages. Thats the very basic reason we go to our webmail box. If we want to go to Wikipedia - we will go there directly.
Sharing of documents is something of an add on and may have some degree of overlap with email… being an online storage model - but allowing email users to access Wikipedia?? shopping services?? games??
I really dont think they are going to successfully push email users to gaming content, or wikipedia, or to purchase tickets. If users want to d othese, they can directly navigate to the vortals. I just dont see any value add in doing this, or did i miss something?
— Vishal Lamba Filed under: Uncategorized
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