Yahoo-less Email

Posted on June 19, 2008

For the first time, Yahoo has added new email domains to its long-standing Yahoo.com, which with more than 260 million subscribers has forced people to use hard-to-remember names when signing up for an account.

So if you signed up for a Yahoo account and now have the good fortune of being known as TomSmith123_w1@Yahoo.com, there’s hope for you. If you hurry, you can get a much more meaningful name now. Albeit, not at Yahoo.com.The addition of ymail.com and rocketmail.com will add millions of new addresses to Yahoo Mail, and let subscribers get the name they want, if they hurry. Yahoo has owned these domains for some time but haven’t really pushed them. That’s understandable since neither adds a single thing to the Yahoo brand.

However, Yahoo has decided since the level of complaints about available names keeps getting worse and worse that now is the time to bring these two domains into the email fold. Users who sign up under the new domains will have access to the same features as the original domain, such as unlimited storage, integrated instant messaging, and spam and virus protection.

Email is one of the legs of Yahoo’s multiservice approach to communications, particularly on mobile phones. They introduced this year a service called oneConnect that combines email, instant messaging, text messaging, and social networking in one mobile platform.

This is one of those business issues that comes from a measure of success. It’s called grow or die. It can be as simple as a single owner/employee business or as complicated as a huge multinational corporation. The principle is the same. Take the simplest component of a business owner working their business and becoming successful. To serve more customers, expansion is necessary. If the business is there, then a failure to add staff or space (whichever is needed), reults in disgruntled customers who go elsewhere and the business suffers or is ruined. To expand sometimes means giving up some control of operations and entrusting more responsibility to others, which may lead to increased success or sudden failure.

Business is tough, large or small.

BTW, do you suppose if Yahoo adds another 100 million email users that Microsoft will add another 5 Billion to the offer??