This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Ben Last.
Original Post: You Have Mail
Feed Title: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Feed URL: http://benlast.livejournal.com/data/rss
Feed Description: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
I've spent much of the last week or so in an office where the Internet is accessible only through the tightest of firewalls. There's no complaint implied here; the value of some of the IP in the building might exceed the value of the entire company, so paranoia is amply justified, but it does mean that I can't fetch my usual POP3 email. This gave me the perfect excuse to see how GMail is going.
I should really refer to it as GoogleMail since I'm in the UK where, amusingly enough, some other outfit has been using the name "GMail" for a while. I do enjoy it when Big American Corporations forget that the rest of the world exists when they're looking at trademarks and patents. Any road up, whatever you call it, a couple of IMs later I had an invitation to sign up and a shiny new googlemail.com address. Many others have written with far more skill and judgement than I on the subject of how G[oogle]Mail does what it does, so I'll refrain from cluttering up the RSS feeds with yet more. What struck me as worth commenting on was the contrast with other web mail interfaces... specifically Exchange's.
For reasons of not-getting-around-to-it, I have only web access to an email account at the place I'm working (it's my laptop, it's not in their domain, etc, etc). This uses Outlook Web Access and it's the sort of web interface that takes one back to the heady, pre-Ajax days five years ago, when Hotmail was king. I mean: it's awful. Pages refresh for any change, looking up any data whilst in the middle of writing an email involves an endless dance of Open Link In New Tab (this is all in Firefox, but IE doesn't add anything). Google, in contrast, have really worked hard and come up with a web interface that's arguably better than some PC-based mail clients.
I think it's a question of attitude. Microsoft still seem to prefer an actual Windows-installable application of some form for almost anything they do. Google, in contrast, have jumped headfirst into the whole Ajax & web thing (with the exception of Google Earth). Thus the web interface is a poor relation in the eyes of the Exchange/Office teams, whereas it's the primary way of doing anything for Google.
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