Forum Moderators: goodroi
According to a half-year report by web analysts at Hitwise, seen exclusively by Times Online, Google trails arch-rivals Yahoo and Microsoft by massive margins in several key online areas in the UK.
... Gmail ... has 2.2 per cent of the market... Hotmail leads with 52.4 per cent, while Yahoo has around 24 per cent...Adam Sohn says Gmail's impact on Hotmail amounted to "a rounding error".
Article [business.timesonline.co.uk]
Google finance is 201 on the list? Well, no kidding! It's only a few months old, is still feature poor.
And people just don't like to readily change their emali addresses. Gmail is not going to hurt the current user base very much. What I would like to know is whether hotmail and yahoo have noticed any slowdown in growth?
What google has done is to cause the other companies to be more user focused. If it wasn't for google, Yahoo mail would probably still have you paying to get over 6 MB of mailbox storage. IF Yahoo and MSN had not increased their mailbox size those numbers would have changed a lot more.
Google is positioning themselves in case the others screw up. AV screwing up was how Google took over the search market. They are just waiting for the companies in the other sectors to do the same.
Google is positioning themselves in case the others screw up. AV screwing up was how Google took over the search market. They are just waiting for the companies in the other sectors to do the same.
Or, vice-versa. ;)
If the current trend of dissatisfied Googlers keeps up, there could be a shift somewhere in the rankings. ;)
I'm rooting for gmail as it's far superior to the rival offerings but it does look like their scattergun policy is not yielding the best results.
What is of more interest to me would be what the growth rate in ACTIVE gmail accounts is. When you are at the top of the heap, it is all about market share. When you are on your way up, it isn't martket share, it's growth.
What are the odds of Google doubling their market share to a measily 5% in the next 2 years? It seems like it is a lot safer bet than MS doubling their share to 108%.
In stock terms, Hotmail is blue chip, Gmail is growth.
Think about Mozilla/Firefox. They were just a "rounding error" on IE's numbers for years. IE still has market share by a large margin. Growing at their small percentage a month has firefox showing at over 20% on all my sites.
Aren't they just making all of the same mistakes Yahoo made when they had about 70% of the market?
Yes, and they're about the same age as Yahoo was. All it says to me is that Google had one good idea, not many good ideas. I'm not knocking them for doing one thing well (at least in the past) but public perception of Google is a place you go to search for stuff, not necessarily get email, weather reports, financial info or Jabber chat. And you sure as hell wouldn't go there to knock up a few excel spreadsheets!
There's also a healthy chunk of their activities that are simply about hype. I read the BBC for much of my general news and there are a minimum of 3 Google stories per week; there are almost none on Yahoo or MSN, or even Microsoft generally.
It's ironic in the extreme that if it's true that Google are using some truly poor software releases to generate marketing they're guilty of activities you get penalized for in their search engine (artificially inflating your importance). Maybe they should blacklist themselves.
The numbers are all about market share in Britain.
Google Finance does not cover the UK properly yet - it has company profiles and news but no quotes or forecasts. It is actually pretty impressive that it has as much as 0.4%. A twentieth of what Yahoo has for a fairly comprehensive finance site.
Google Maps has 18% of the market in the UK, putting it in second position behind multi-map who have been around for a long time. That sounds like success to me.
Gmail will take a long time to take much market share.
Google news is not much of success, but I suspect that is because the product category (news search engines) is not a success. The BBC is a very different type of site to Google news.
I realise most of the people here have no trouble getting Gmail invitations when they need to, but many casual internet users I know have few or no sources for invitations.
If Google eventually remove this limitation (when they move Gmail out of this ridiculously long beta?) perhaps that will help their market share because Gmail is otherwise quite newbie-friendly.
