Email war: Google versus Microsoft

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Google and Microsoft have launched hard hitting campaigns against each other’s online email services

Email remains one of the killer apps on the Internet. Research from the Radicati Group shows that the number of worldwide email accounts is projected to increase from 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion by 2014.

While many users continue to use applications like Outlook to send and receive email, more and more people are using webmail (online email) services like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail to communicate via email.

Free email services are funded by advertising, and this system has been revolutionized by Google’s contextual advertising system which provides advertising related to the email content relevant to users. This provides a higher likelihood of success for advertisers, and hence higher revenues for Google.

Ads that appear in Gmail are similar to the ads that appear next to the Google search results and on content pages throughout the web. In Gmail, ads are related to the content of a user’s email messages. “Our goal is to provide Gmail users with ads that are useful and relevant to their interests,” Google says.

Microsoft has now taken aim at Google’s Gmail service with a hard hitting advertising campaign criticizing the fact that Google ‘reads’ emails to deliver content aware advertising.

Google is also taking aim at Microsoft’s Hotmail service with a quirky new website encouraging people to migrate away from Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL’s online mail services to Gmail.

The website encourages people to send an automatically generated ‘intervention email’ to their friends who are using ‘outdated’ email services using a simple web form.

“You’ve probably already improved the lives of your friends and family members by helping them switch to Gmail, but what about that one friend who still hasn’t made the switch? It’s time to take a stand and stage an intervention,” the ‘Gmail EmailIntervention’ website states.