What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? 279
caluml writes "There is a humourous look at "What would happen if Microsoft had designed GMail". Gems include: "Another security measurement we'll add is that you won't be able to log-in with just username anymore but are required to enter the full username@gmail.com. Furthermore, we will change the browser URL from 'http://gmail.microsoft.com/' to the more professional looking 'http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home'.""
Yahoo (Score:5, Funny)
Hotmail...? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Microsoft has designed the monster that Hotmail is today all by them selves.
Naturally after MS bought Hotmail, I switched to real email - POP3 and the like.
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Not any more. Before I used msn@joe-baldwin.net or somesuch, but one day I got a message at sign in telling me I had to either get a Hotmail account or change my Passport to something under the messengeruser.com domain (e.g. joebaldwin@messengeruser.com is the one i picked).
I've been using my @Yahoo.com e-mail address as my MSN passport forever. Basically I signed up for MSN a while ago because, hey, everybody uses it {sigh} and in my old {cough} age I now prioritize the ability to communicate with people over and above the dusty 'ol soapbox. However I cancelled my Hotmail account the day Microsoft bought it out and I refuse to get a new one.
As somebody else suggested, you may have been singled out, or they may have put a baited hook out there and you chomped on it. On and
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Hm.. (Score:4, Funny)
Sort of like if Microsoft designed the iPod box?
Re:Hm.. (Score:5, Funny)
What if Microsoft had designed anti-baldness cream? [wordpress.com]
What if Microsoft designed a house? [planetperplex.com]
What if Microsoft designed the Katana? [dkimages.com]
Can I get some AdSense money now?
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Re:Hm.. (Score:4, Funny)
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That video "What if Microsoft designed the iPod box?" was made AT MICROSOFT. It was first shown during an internal company meeting.
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They have design a webmail site... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong (as if people wouldn't), but doesn't the Gmail system scan your emails so that it can send you targetted ads? Doesn't that make taking the piss out of Microsoft's security a lot hypocritical?
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:4, Informative)
FUD is bad, regardless of whether it is pro-Google FUD, or anti-Google FUD.
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you mean they "sell your email address to spammers", well, I have more evidence of GOOGLE doing that than Microsoft. My Hotmail account receives no spam at all (it's quite long, but still). My Gmail account receives about a few pieces a week. Here's the interesting bit: I don't USE my Gmail account. Ever. I don't post the email address anywhere, use it to sign up to anything, or even email real people with it. So how did the spammers guess it? (Note: it is also quite long, with fullstops in it).
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Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:4, Interesting)
First address: 10 letters, not indexed by google. It has 348 mails in the spam folder I received about 4 spam mails in the inbox over the same time period (60 days)
Second address: 8 letters, indexed by google. It has 459 mails in the spam folder and I received about 4 spam mails in the inbox over the same time period
Third address: 8 letters with spam as a suffix, indexed by google. It has 0 mails in the spam folder and I received 0 spam mails in the inbox over the same time period.
It would appear that the safest way to not get spam is to have an address with the phrase spam contained in it. The spam suffix address is also the one I've been most promiscuous with yet no spam at all is received.
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Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.news.com/2100-1023-230411.html [news.com]
Since I heard about this and followed Microsofts response I made a mental note to never get a Hotmail account.
As for scanning my emails to show me targeted adverts I don't really mind this providing the information is not sold on to other companies.
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Apparently not that long. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/29/gmail_vuln/ [theregister.co.uk]
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that I already have link that takes me to gmail: http://www.google.com./ [www.google.com] As soon as you make it any more complicated I will probably smell a rat. Why would I trust a link to gmail from anyone apart from google? If you could get your link to the top of the google search results for "gmail" you might be in with a chance.
If you know anything about web development and hacking you know that XSS is a nightmare to prevent if you have users that really are stupid enough to click on every random link to your site that they find.
The Hotmail hack could be executed by anyone with very little technical knowledge and no action on the part of the user of the email box you were trying to snoop on (Apart from the obvious issue of going to hotmail in the first place).
Please tell me you understand the difference between these two types of attack or you have no place taking place in a discussion of internet security.
Re:They have design a webmail site... (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong (as if people wouldn't), but doesn't the Gmail system scan your emails so that it can send you targetted ads? Doesn't that make taking the piss out of Microsoft's security a lot hypocritical?
Yes, but Google are not evil. :)
Seriously, yes, Gmail does scan your e-mails and send targeted ads to you. They also scan your search results and send targeted ads. They also scan web pages you visit and send you targeted ads based on the content therein (providing the web page belongs to Google Adsense).
This is their business model. Ads on the Internet, much like ads on television are inevitable. The difference is in the degree. Just exactly how invasive are the ads - are they flashing banner ads that are totally irrelevant to you and your life, sponsored spam that makes it into your inbox (or just due to really lousy spam filters) or are they small relatively harmless textual ads that correspond to your general interests?
Gmail is, IMHO, the least invasive alternative. Now, myself, I just have my Gmail account forwarded to my home server where it's parsed by my own local spam filters (second round) and sorted into its own folder on my IMAP server so I never see their ads (or, in point of fact their interface) so it's all moot to me. :)
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Unfortunately, this was the third link when I googled for "gmail retention policy", but it answers a lot of questions about gmail privacy. Hell, it's even written in English that I can understand.
To quote: "We will make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."
Sounds good enough to me.
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My main concern is not the ads, but the spying. I don't like it. When you list Gmail as the least invasive alternative, you ignore that we can pay for our own email accounts. You can pay for an email service for less than £15.00 per year which most people can afford. I do not understand why people must have a free account when the cost of a professional service that you actually control is so low.
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My main concern is not the ads, but the spying. I don't like it. When you list Gmail as the least invasive alternative, you ignore that we can pay for our own email accounts. You can pay for an email service for less than £15.00 per year which most people can afford. I do not understand why people must have a free account when the cost of a professional service that you actually control is so low.
Every e-mail provider, to some degree, snoops atleast portions of your communications. Google are just more up front about it. If you don't like the way your free e-mail service gains funding stop using it and pay for a service. End of story. Meanwhile, stop complaining about it.
Meanwhile GMail is a more desirable service than Hotmail (kind of the point of the article) because the ads are less invasive, more pointed and therefore more useful to its users.
The whole thing really boils down to the fact t
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Any third party email sevice provider has the capability of scanning your email, for what ever reason they want. Just because Gmail openly scans to serve targeted ads, doesn't mean Microsoft doesn't do it secretly to steal information from you.
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The possibility that something I'm not aware of is happening has no bearing on whether I object to something that I am aware of. Might as well say not to object to someone telling me they stole my money because it's possible I've been robbed before and didn't know it.
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the reason you have to put the @ (Score:4, Informative)
why is this news? slllooww news day
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Re:the reason you have to put the @ (Score:5, Insightful)
So perhaps they should make it aware of the URL the user types in the browser... if I visit by typing msn.com and I login with the @msn.com email, but if I type hotmail.co.uk then my mail login will be @hotmail.co.uk
Re:the reason you have to put the @ (Score:4, Funny)
We considered that, but then we'd have to add a set of radio buttons there that say "Use the same domain name as in the URL" and "Always use the domain name: ___", and then we'd have add a "Remember my answer (in a cookie)" checkbox, and then a *second* checkbox to ask if you want to remember the setting of the first checkbox. (I think most people do not realize how difficult it is to write good software.) It did get through testing but the marketing people complained it took too much space away from possible banner ads.
In the end, forcing people to type "@hotmail.com" a lot isn't a bad thing: we're reminding them about our great brand. Whenever people spend time on Microsoft sites but thinking about cool brands we bought like "Hotmail" instead of losing brands we built like "Microsoft", that's a win for us.
- Love,
The Hotmail Team
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Sure that would be awesome when it works. And then one day, you click a link somewhere that takes you to the hotmail page via the 'wrong' URL, and it rejects your username and password.
Maybe it would give a helpful message like. Please verify you are entering it in the correct case, oh, and chec
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While funny ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, the problem there is not with the preview pane. The problem is with your software executing image content as code.
Gmail does it right imho.. it displays a snippet of the first sentence, more than enough for me to tell if it's worth opening when the subject/sender is questionable.
Well
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Thunderbird does that too, and I find that I rarely need to see embedded graphics. Sometimes when I get an emailed receipt from an online order I'll click the "Load Images" button, so I can print it properly. Usually though, the graphics are superfluous and I just want to read the text.
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Does the preview pane exist because e-mails are typically 3-5 lines? Or are corporate e-mails only 3-5 lines, because we know that nobody will ever read beyond what's in the Outlook preview pane?
If the first is true, then Microsoft did a good job of assessing hte situation, and implementing a solution.
If the second is true, we've got a rather bad situation on our hands for all the
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I can only assume you've not used that many email clients. Yes Outlook sucks, but so does Thunderbird - it just sucks less.
Examples of Thunderbird's suckage:
* if you click "check mail" while it's already checking your mail, a dialogue pops up saying something like "The action cannot be performed because the folder is already being processed". What's wrong with simply ignoring the click? (Or at least displaying a less generic message)
* I get a hell of a lot o
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Oh, and having switched on the option to compact folders when it would save more than 100KB, I just got another point of suckage for Thunderbird - I marked a mail as junk and now have a modal dialogue with the following message:
"The folder 'Junk' cannot be compacted because another operation i
Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdot gmail (Score:5, Funny)
1) Strange, fixed "color" scheme;
2) Cluttered, but oddly comforting and hyperconfigurable, user interface (except the colors);
3) Random in-joke-based poll every 18 months;
4) Almost usable search engine;
5) People who want to contact you first email editors who then "approve" or "reject" incoming emails based on their personal taste;
6) Arbitrarily assign other users to read your email and act as moderators;
7) AC option gives spammers a fair shot (albeit at a lower mod base) -- don't forget to check AC before emailing something really stupid like this post;
You know, it just might work!
Re:Slashdot gmail (Score:5, Funny)
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Can we have a "What would Slashdot look like if someone artistic designed it" Page?
It's already been done [slashdot.org] and implemented, and [slashdot.org] if [slashdot.org] I [slashdot.org] was [slashdot.org] one [slashdot.org] of [slashdot.org] the [slashdot.org] guys [slashdot.org] who [slashdot.org] participated [slashdot.org] I'd be pretty pissed at your comment.
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Ahhh, yes, design by committee.
Exactly! Except that it's not design by committee at all.
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What if...... (Score:3, Funny)
You mean what if Gmail had been designed for... (Score:5, Insightful)
The mass market instead of early adopters?
new gmail vs new hotmail (Score:2)
Moogle? (Score:4, Funny)
Another modern classic: What if Google search had been designed by the guys behind Windows Search
"Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search" [secretgeek.net]
Yeah... Seen this joke before, except funny (Score:2)
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Nothing beats the original (Score:3, Informative)
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clippy (Score:2)
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blame marketing droids (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a primary failing. One that Google, miraculously, seems to have so far avoided. Full credit is due.
Marketing depts make two mistakes.
- (and foremost) They ask people what they want. They convene a focus group of a cross section of people, brainstorm and come up with a list of priorities. The issues with this being that most people don't know what they want, no committee ever came up with anything minimalist, functional or streamlined, and most people in a focus group are only statistically representative -- but not representative in reality.
- They have no understanding of pure Economics. They attempt to maximize revenue from everything up to the point that function is destroyed and satisfaction is lost. Thereby devaluing the product.
Apple and Google are far more successful than many other similar brands. They value function and form. This is why they are successful. This why they have fanboys. It's not rocket science, all you need to do is fire the marketing droids out of the nearest airlock.Re: (Score:2)
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What if.... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh...
Warning (Score:2)
Well really come on, the whole type the whole address thing? It's absurd!
Missed a few points (Score:3, Informative)
When you finally get to read a message it starts warning that the mere act of opening it is dangerous, and offers links to self congratulatory advertising disguised as help saying stuff like "Sender ID is a technical solution started by Microsoft" and goes on to boast that "Windows Live Hotmail treats all messages that fail Sender ID and phishing tests as fraudulent" which is a bit excessive considering the world has yet to be convinced Sender ID is some kind of panacea for phishing.
It used to be that if the mail contained links it would open with an iframe displaying sponsorshop messages, but today I see that there are no hyper-links for something that clearly is that, not only with dots but preceded with http, but no, I have have to copy and paste this in to a new tab. I really can't think of any mail client that would deny a hyper-link when it saw one.
Next: at the top of the message there is a message saying "Attachments, pictures, and links in this message have been blocked for your safety. Show content" - when I click show content nothing changes except I don't see this warning. So I guess this warning is there just because it does not comply with MS Sender ID, hardly an intelligent algorithm for warning people about something that may or may not exist.
I expect I could go on and on, but I think you get the drift..
Designed by Microsoft? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Okay, I know... (Score:2)
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ROTFLOL.. looks like yahoo! (Score:2)
I suppose switching to Hotmail Classic (Score:3, Funny)
Windows Live Mail is pretty impressive (Score:2, Informative)
But seriously... (Score:2)
Blocked EXE attachments (Score:3, Informative)
Oh wait, GMail blocks those already. Glad to know
Wouldn't it look like... (Score:2)
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ieupdate (Score:2)
Microsoft somehow snuck some sort of adware onto the computers that will randomly once in a while load up the Get It Now page for IE7 instead of the actual homepage.
It's not exactly adware. If you watch the URLs that it loads on the way there, you'll see "ieupdate" in a couple of them, which makes me thing it's just periodically checking for updates. And no, I don't know how to disable it within Internet Explorer. But I haven't seen it since I installed Opera on one machine and Firefox on the other.
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http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222639 [microsoft.com]
Or you should be able to disable this in group policy: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Internet Explorer -> Enable "Disable Periodic Check for Internet Explorer Software Updates".
Didn't see an
Re:Developed not Designed (Score:5, Interesting)
It brings me to my inbox, with a one line plug for their Google Reader service, and a one line text add for an IT service outsourcing company that's placed near the top of the site. I open an email, and color matched text ads span from top to bottom on the right, similar to a newspaper column. Only the content of the text ads change, not the color, shape, or location.
For Yahoo, both new and classic bring me to some sort of welcome page with a 1x4" ad for their own search service titled "Top Electronics Search", and at least it matches the colors of the rest of the site. There's a big news widget thing in the center. To the right, there's a big f'ing RED, square, Bank of America credit card ad. On the left, the top and bottom of my Outlook-like directory are straddled by little, fugly, Win95 desktop icon-ads. "Bad credit? Card in 3 days", "Netflix Only $4.99/mo.", "Best SUV for Everyday", "Gold's Gym Free 7 Day VIP Pass".
The NEW Yahoo Mail site warns that Safari is not a supported browser, click to ignore. It is cleverly disguised as Outlook, with ads. Moving right along, I click a mail in my inbox, the BoA ad disapears, and the right ad region resizes to allow a shit-you-not, blinking "Have You Checked Your Credit Score This Month?" ad that runs from top to bottom of the page.
The CLASSIC Yahoo Mail site has a 'classical' giant, horizontal, animated ebay ad across the top, and in the same places on the left are more desktop-icon-ads, "See your credit score - free", "Netflix...", "Online Degree Programs", "Gold's Gym...", oh, and with a slightly different icon as the VIP pass, "Gold's Gym 7 Day Free Trial" It looks like a high schooler designed it.
I'll take Gmail, fuck you very much.
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