Who Can Defeat Yahoo Now?

Yahoo plans to remove any limitation concerning storage space for e-mails, allowing users to keep all of their messages forever.

Back in 2006, some confidential information leaked from Mountain View, about a possible online storage service, dubbed GDrive, that was supposed to be the solution to users’ ever-increasing need for storage space. That was the signal that eventually led to an explosion of similar online services which, for a modicum sum, can fairly replace your PC’s hard drive.

Faced with the threat of concurrence, Web giants like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have speculated the momentum and progressively increased the storage space for their e-mail services.

From the 4MB Yahoo was offering back in 1997, to the 1GB Google was offering in 2004 for its Gmail service things have rapidly evolved and eventually the “simple” e-mail turned into a fierce battle for customers who click on the commercials displayed inside their virtual postal boxes. Google was again the first to raise the bar at 2G, prompting an immediate response from its search-engine rival Yahoo, which in late 2004 showed its muscles with 250 MB of virtual space, soon after that- in 2005- increasing it even more, at 1GB.

Despite Google’s generous offer to users, their service remained quite unpopular, especially because until recently users had to sign-up using an invitation from somebody else- unlike Yahoo’s approach, which poses no restrictions at sign-up.

All restrictions have now been eliminated by Yahoo, which is allegedly planning to offer to all of its e-mail subscribers unlimited storage space, starting May 2007.

“We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails,” Yahoo co-founder David Filo said in a phone interview with Reuters. “You can keep stuff forever.”

According to Reuters, officials said the decision to remove e-mail storage limits reflects the plunging cost of storage as new personal computers store up to a trillion bytes of data and owners of 80-gigabyte iPods can carry 100 hours of video in their pockets.

“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives,” said Filo, who is still active in managing technical operations at the Sunnyvale, California-based company and carries the honorific title of Chief Yahoo.

Yahoo is aiming to have all of its e-mail subscribers “upgraded” within a month, except for China and Japan. “We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans,” John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said.

“We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average,” Kremer told Reuters by phone . “What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos.”

The Terms of Use will be renewed with this occasion, forbidding any regular user to offer Yahoo space for business purposes, as it is intended only for personal use only.

Good news also for photographers: Yahoo considers increasing storage space for its Flickr site, which is now the top destination for those who wish to keep their photos online. “We are looking at those on a case-by-case basis,” Kremer added.

Following a period of decline in profits, Yahoo is undergoing a series of changes- regarding both its business model and the executive and administrative staff- in order to keep up with rivals like Google (which is now estimated at $155 billion) or Microsoft.

Beginning February 14, some users of Yahoo! Mail are be able to chat in real-time using a new instant messaging (IM) feature which is integrated into the Yahoo! Mail beta. The new feature, built on the Yahoo! Messenger platform will be available to all users in the coming months.

More than 73 million people all over the world use the Yahoo Messenger and more than 257 million access Yahoo’s mail service on a regular basis.