Why Microsoft/Yahoo! is maybe too perfect
So one of the talking points about Microsoft! has been the question of government, i.e. antitrust, approval. While many think it passes muster behind a fervent desire for somebody, anybody to really compete with Google in search, I’m not quite so sanguine about a merger to duopoly in a market with such importance to our information economy. But that’s not what’s stuck in my antitrust craw here. Nobody’s talking about Microsoft!’s resulting dominance of web-based email services. They may a distant 2 and 3 in search, but they are the clear 1 and 2 of webmail, with Gmail running 3rd by a big margin. For all its technical excellence and geek cred, Gmail just hasn’t made significant inroads on the years of accumulated Yahoo and Hotmail accounts.
Now the reason I think nobody really sees an antitrust concern here is that the threshold question of market definition is a tricky one. Can we really say that webmail is a distinct market from all the ISP, hosting and corporate email accounts available to people? I do think the case can be made that the corporate market is distinct; most everyone I know makes a clear separation between their uses of work and home addresses, or at least actively uses both of them. The home market, where people can use a webmail address, or one given them by their ISP, or increasingly an address at their own domain from their hosting provider, is certainly more difficult to tease apart, but I think webmail is slowly but surely taking the field.
I’ve recently moved the whole clan over to Google Apps for our domains because it eliminates all of my maintenance hassles; anyone’s email client is misbehaving (I glare in your general direction, Leopard Mail), I just tell them to use the Gmail interface until I get around to it. I’m predicting soon they’ll just use that all the time. I think webmail clients are good enough now that they are clearly the right solution for almost everyone, especially when you can use them with your own domains. If these services are going to dominate the personal email market, then I think it could be entirely appropriate to put some conditions on the Microsoft! deal, like perhaps data portability, to ensure that competition isn’t entirely foreclosed.
Update 2/2: Tim O’Reilly is also concerned, and points us towards all the data-mining potential being discovered in email, which is an excellent point that I totally missed. I just assumed email was important enough already, but now that O’Reilly brings it up, I think we ain’t seen nothing yet.
evan :: Feb.02.2008 :: Notions :: No Comments »