On 16 Apr 2008, at 13:33 , Simon Waters wrote:
Ask anyone in the business "if I want a free email account who do I use.." and you'll get the almost universal answer Gmail.
I think amongst those not in the business there are regional trends, however. Around this neck of the woods (for some reason) the answer amongst your average, common-or-garden man in the street is "yahoo!". I don't know why this is. But that's my observation. There are also the large number of people using Y! mail who don't realise they're using Y! mail, because the telco or cableco they use for access have outsourced mail operations to Y!, and there are still (apparently) many people who assume that access providers and mail providers should match. In those cases choice of mail provider may have far more to do with "price of tv channel selections" or "availability of long-distance voice plans" than anything to do with e- mail. So, with respect to your other comments, correlation between technical/ operational competence and customer choice seems weak, from my perspective. If there's competition, it may not driven by service quality, and the conclusion that well-staffed abuse desks promote subscriber growth is, I think, faulty. Joe