An offer one cannot refuse

You have the option to listen to the nice dialog that follows:

Michael: So the next day, my father went to see him; only this time with Luca Brasi. And within an hour, he signed a release, for a certified check for $1,000.
Kay: How'd he do that?
Michael: My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
Kay: What was that?
Michael: Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains -- or his signature -- would be on the contract.

Why did I post this? Because I cannot forget this dialog -with background sound and all- every time I hear the word 'offer'. That was a dialog from one of the greatest movies I have seen: one of the greatest movies of all time: Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. Michael Corleone, the youngest son of Don Vitto Corleone aka The Godfather, talks with his girlfriend Kay on his sisters' wedding day, and Kay gets to know what kind of a family Michael's is.



Released in 1972, The Godfather is still in the first place of IMDB's top 250 movie list of all time. The line "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" in particular was selected as the number 1 of the top 30 movie lines of all times by AskMen.

With apologies for this straying away from the topic, -with my fond memories-, let me get back to the road: I'll explain later why this quote came in to my mind - and the topic today is:

GMail says: I'll make an offer you can't refuse.

Well there are thousands of blog posts on this topic: but still there are things that haven't been said apart from "1GB wow! this is great". Especially I wasn't lured by the 1GB. My thought was more in the line "100MB in hard disk worths more than 1GB remote". But I realised that it's not the matter here.

I wouldn't talk on how great GMail is, because it's been well documented already: what is interesting for me is how MS and Yahoo let GMail to beat them on this grounds.

With all it's technical excellence, with all it's speed, GMail almost forces one to say 'yes' to web mail. I don't like Google to be another MS, but when it comes to innovation, Google has the edge. I realised this when my MS fan friend was amazed by GMail: google could beat MS and Yahoo once again in a field where MS and Yahoo were the best: looks like both the giants did not learn anything from their first defeat at the search engine battle.

What attracts one to GMail is not 1GB. The interface is something novel: it has the Google's signature simplicity compared to Yahoo and Hotmails bloat. But when it comes to performance, both in speed and features, GMail easily beats both mail giants. Especially when it comes to the extensive use of DHTML to enhance the interface: I tried with both IE and Mozilla, and it works fine. It's actuallly a shame on MS to be beaten by a newcomer by freakin DHTML - where we all thought MS had an advantage.

Instead of shouting "MS sucks - google rocks", I hope this would lead MS and Yahoo to rethink seriously on the issues: some issues I previously noted down: basically, that even a free service is a two-way contract: not something that is merely donated to the user.

These points look so naive and obvious, but I can show you heaps of events (As I have shown here) to show that MS in particular is not going to understand these simple rules. If you're not convinced, go search for "Yahoo Messenger" on MSN search. The first search result you are getting will be a link to MSN messenger. MS admits that it was a 'featured link' from it's partners, but why the ^%*% should I care? All I wanted to look for is Yahoo messenger, and all I need is the best results that matches it: changing search engine results for business purposes was a thing in early 90's. That time is gone, and it won't probably come back unless all three search engines collectively decide to be ugly. (Personally, I don't have any faith as such that Google would not.) But for now at least, this is not the case, and MS is clearly oblivious to that reality.

We are yet to know whether GMail will be 'the thing' in web based mail, but there are good reasons to believe that it would be, given that it can support a very large number of users. But it clearly gives an option we can't refuse - to see advertising, for instance: in the case of Yahoo, I was particularly pissed off when Yahoo stopped POP3. Why? because it offered me nothing in return, but said "it's free, take it or leave it". GMail, on the other hand, provides a heap of features that I cannot possibly use out of it's own interface. And it has got rid of the drawbacks of web interface by technology: spell check, for instance is something more than cool. What does is ask for all these facilities? nothing but a chance to show a text ad you wouldn't even notice, instead of flashy adds Yahoo shows.

So, in the case of GMail, the 'offer' it does to check mail in a web interface is something we cannot refuse: we get better features that we wouldn't get in a normal email client, GMail did the dirty DHTML work and took care that we are least inconvenienced of limitations inherent to web, and for all that, it puts a simple text ad. It's really fast too. Personally I wouldn't bother setting up my email client to check GMail even if Google provided POP.

I sincerely hope Yahoo and MS would learn: it's not very good to have one and only one big solution for all your needs, and it's certainly not good to have some more bossy/dirty tactics to retain people. You were late and sloppy MS, now I wish you'd at least follow :-)