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The other day, i was chatting with a friend of mine who lives in Shipra. He was in his room in shipra. He asked me whether i have Hyderabad blues 2 songs. I said no.
After some time, Anuj came to my room and said that he has those songs. I copied them from his system. I informed my friend in shipra(who was still online) that the songs are here. He asked me to mail them. I said are you serious? One song was 13 mb large. he could easily take it on a CD RW the day after. But he was very eager to listen to the song.

That’s when Gmail came into rescue. The great email service offers 1 GB of space with unlimited(ofcourse < 1GB) attachment size. I mailed him the song. Then another song and then also mailed him some softwares. Somehow from the inside, i was feeling happy. Thets what i want to elaborate in this article. We are finally using the next generation communication services! Imagine honestly. how many of you even thought of mailing a file more than 5 or 6 mb in size a few months back? But this great company changed everything. And above all, its email service is not even publically launched yet! Goggle launched the Gmail beta and invited a few people to test it. Those few elites were given some invites to invite whomsoever they want. And the chain continued. Somehow, the chain also reached our hostel to a person who doesn’t want his name to be written here. He passed on the privilage to me. For a few days, we really felt proud and differentiated from the others. Well, all gud things must come to an end. Both of us got invites. we invited many friends and now, many of us have spare invitations left! The point i m trying to make here is that Gmail, just by announcing that it would be offering 1 GB of space, shattered the roots of the major webmails in the world. Soon after, our own desi Rediffmail joined the spree and converted the accounts to 1 GB!!! following Yahoo(which now offers 100 MB space). The attachment size was also increased by a few megabytes. Hotmail has recently announced to convert the accounts to 250 MB.

In the meantime, another mail service opened. Aventuremail. It claimed to offer 2 GB spae. But again. Its registerations closed very early and are still not open. Another service Youvegotpost.com, started offering 1 TB!!! But soon the size reduced to even 20 MB.

Returning to the main topic, we started sending songs and softwares to each other using Gmail(even in the hostel). Although the process was slower, but we felt a little motivated to do so. It really feels good to say to someone “Hey, i have sent you an mp3 on your gmail account. Listen to it and tell me how it was.”

So, we are finally here. in the age of next generation mail service. Where people can send files mbytes in size. But i’d also like to make another point here. Not every player had the stamina to survive in the market as is evident from the results of aventuremail and youvegotpost. Google was smart enough to increase the number of users gradually by using invites. Yahoo also made it by increasing only to 100 MB. And Rediff? it does not even has much accounts to fear that it will fall. Aventuremail and Youvegotpost took a wrong step by straight away offering their services to the public.

Here comes the jist of my previous blog. “Why do we compete?”

Google doesnt need to compete with anybody. Its mere announcement changed the paradigm. Just imagine what will happen after it launches its services for public! Rumours are that Google is also developing its Instant messenger using orkut. I’m sure people will divorce Yahoo and MSN and marry google. They really are making the world a better place to live. What did other companies do? They just increased their storage capacity and finished! Whereas, Google is constantly trying to provide the best it can to the public. That is why it is miles aheah of the rest. There are higher limits to everything than one can imagine.

Another company whose name comes into my mind in this scenerio is Reliance Infocomm. This company was concieved by Mr. Mukesh Ambani more than 5 years back. That was the time when, what to talk of mobiles, even land lines were not so common. Having a P&T telephone was considered to be a thing of pride for a middle class family. there were schedules for rates – 1/2, full, quarter and that bugging “All lines to this route are busy. Please try after some time.” Mobiles were considered a rich man’s things and were used rarely due to high rates and that too for voice calls only.

Now picture this –
At that point in time, this great man and his great father imagined a world of this time. A time when mobiles will be so common that even Rickshaw wallah, electricians and Dhobis will have their personal mobiles. They forsighted that voice calls will not be the only usage of a mobile. It will be used for DATA calls and multimedia content as well. Could any of us even think of such a thing at that time? And even if we could, we didn’t have enough money to put it in motion (LOL). But again they could forsee beyond imagination.

And yes, they have made it. The 24,000 crore Reliance Infocomm is here. With not only offering mobile services, but also offering enterprise communication, storage, and computing solutions to corporates. Evidences are that they are rolling out their set top boxes codenamed “Netway” next year. This little box will give you hundreds of channels, broadband internet connection, an IP phone and many more things which you cannot even imagine (but i can as i have read their document on Netway. If anybody wants to imagine, drop me a mail, i’ll send you the document) for a few hundred bucks per month!

Again reliance is not competing with anybody. This is quite evident from the fact that their call rates are way below the others. Had they been competing, they would have kept their rates a few paise below the others and waited for someone to drop. But no, just as Google initiated the space war in mails, they initiated the price war in mobiles.

Both the above cited examples remind me of a saying by Dough Larson i saw on the wallpaper of my friend in the first paragraph:

“Some of the world’s greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.”

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