yahoo buys stata labs

Oh, man things are getting interesting in the Google v. Yahoo v. Microsoft battle.  Gotta believe that Yahoo didn't pick up Stata Labs for their Windows spam assassin client, but rather for the search tech that's inside Bloomba.  It's not hard to imagine them building a rich client for email and feed reading that complements the online experience that I'm sure they're building with what they picked up from Oddpost.

The other interesting thing about this is that the Outlook-alternative market is once again wide open.  It's now down to Eudora and Thunderbird, neither of which have decent email search tools, nor offer any significant "intertwinglyness" that modern communication clients so desperately need.

Comments

[Dave McClure]

>>Outlook-alternative market is once again wide open
>>now down to Eudora and Thunderbird

actually, you forgot the other "Outlook alternative"... namely, Outlook *Express* (free with IE download; also pre-loaded on many older PCs).

with perhaps 100M+ OE users out there, seems a bit strange that Microsoft has basically decided to orphan the product, until you realize they're just trying to get as many of those folks as they can to upgrade to Office/Outlook and get some license fees out of it.

still, there's a ton of Outlook Express users out there who aren't likely to upgrade anytime soon, and they *far* outnumber the Eudora and other email client userbases. in fact, i always wondered if someone were willing to offer a good scheduling component that integrated well with OE, they could probably get a lot of customers (er, freeloaders?) pretty quickly.

other interesting email product you've never heard of is Incredimail... didn't know it existed until i started checking into email client stats and saw a pretty decent-size userbase.

for more info, see this 2003 email client survey from Ralph Wilson (note: don't be put off by the "bible study" stats... just think "bible study = consumer market").

- dmc

[michael sippey]

You know, Dave -- your hand slapping is right on the money; I did forget OE. And that's just wrong, since I used OE for /years/ as my sole email client. Even in its current incarnation it's fast, full-featured and blessedly easy to use. As you note, it's a shame that they haven't done anything with the product; even when IE went from v5 to v6, they didn't do much of anything to OE.

I haven't looked at incredimail for a couple of years -- thanks for the pointer! Can't underestimate the power of custom backgrounds in outbound email...

[Vijay]

Look this up. Yahoo! is opening up in India where Stata had a stake.

[Joe]

Everyone else in the USA is using India for there inexpensive wages. I guess Yahoo could get on that wagon too.