AOL to create new free webmail service shock
To offer less space than its own Netscape Webmail?
By Fernando Cassia: Saturday 25 December 2004, 13:36
SEVERAL sources are reporting plans by Time Warner unit America Online to offer their own "free web email" service to people who are not AOL subscribers, the reports claim.
We understand that it's a redundant statement because "free for subscribers" wouldn't be quite free after all. Such a service, to be available in "late 2005" is "expected to have an address book, signature, filter for spam, and search", almost exactly what you get right now with Netscape Webmail, when used with Netscape.com's latest Mozilla Suite 1.7 based browser (Netscape 7.2) as your e-mail client.
TechTree.com claims that AOL's grand plan is to "offer a wider range of free services and earn advertising revenue like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo". That's quite interesting, because that's exactly what AOL's Netscape.com portal is doing already. And Netscape, last we heard, was part of the same company. To make this plan more odd, the report ends by saying that the new AOL web mail free service "could have a storage limit of 100 MB". If this is true, could someone tell AOL planners that the business conglomerate already offers 250MB of free e-mail storage on the Netscape unit's Webmail?. Is this another case of the "Right-hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing" syndrome?.
A screenshot of the beta service, dubbed "AOL Email on the Web" and which CNet says resembles MS-Outlook, is posted here. The more and more we think about this, the more it looks like an unwise turf war between AOL and Netscape.com's divisions.
Have you seen any other company that re-invents the wheel by developing two competing free webmail services? µ
