Gmail offers surprising innovation lessons for the Fortune 500
If you’re familiar with the story of Gmail, you know – for a fact – that it was a 20% time employee project by Paul Buchheit. A little bottom-up experimentation that grew into something big. Surprise! That story is wrong. It was a desire by Google, the company, to offer its own email. From Harry McCracken’s great piece How […]
Learn From the Gmail Fiasco: You Need Redundant Copies of Your Email–Don’t Worry, It’s Painless :-)
A few hundred thousand (numbers range from 150k to 500K) Gmail and Google Apps users had the scary experience of losing ALL their email content yesterday. Their account was accidentally “reset”. Google acknowledged the error, and issued a statement that they are working on restoring “lost” content. Let’s stop and think here a minute. Is […]
Gmail, Don’t be a Yahoo!
In the 90’s I used to laugh at friends who all used Yahoo! as their personal email service. I did not understand how anyone could put up with the slow speeds of web-mail, and tried to convince them to install a decent email client, like Outlook, which is what most of them used in their […]
Gmail Migration Tools Attack Inertia
A few years ago a software recruiter told me how he deleted job applications sent from a Hotmail account: after all, how could an applicant claim to be technology-savvy and still be using hotmail? Seriously. While Yahoo was by far not as bad as Hotmail, there was a stigma attached to using the free webmail […]
Resistance is Futile: Google is Unstoppable
Two seemingly unrelated items: Today Hitwise reported on how Google Maps is catching up on Mapquest, which once was the king of online mapping. Perhaps more important than just the numbers is the source of traffic: 61% of Google Maps traffic comes from links placed in organic Google Search results. Contrast that to Mapquest, […]
