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Rediff announces Unlimited Storage Space
Rediff's Chairman Ajit Balakrishnan and Marketing Head Manish Agarwal yesterday proudly announced their new offering of unlimited storage space to their 50 million users of rediffmail.
Existing users and new users will now have a permanent lifetime account with rediffmail without worrying of limitations of MB's and GB's, thus offering the possibility of using their email service as a lifelong archive of emails.
Besides email archiving, the service can be used to store documents, presentations, audio files, video files etc.
Manish mentioned that rather than be part of the rat race of announcing more and more gb space compared to rivals like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail, they decided to change the rules of the game by making this unlimited storage announcement.
Ajit shared his view that in future 2 things are certain, free storage and free bandwidth for all. Unfortunately, due to legal issues in India, Rediff is unable to offer the files for further collaboration or public sharing, but the code has been enabled for users to embed them on their sites or share the files whenever legality permits.
Rediff has invested a lot in software and hardware to offer this services, all the emails are encrypted and therefore secure, and are also compressed to consume minimal space.
Unlimited storage for life is certainly a big bold commitment. What are your thoughts ?
Will this divert users from hotmail,yahoo, gmail to rediffmail?
What are the other key differentiators an email service provider should have ?
Will it be very expensive for rediff to maintain this compared to monetization from traffic and a active user base ?
How will competitor's react ?
Will users really need unlimited storage or will they continue to store their files on local hard disks, CD's, DVD's and pendrives ?
I think the announcement will certainly do good for Rediff and it is good to see them be more ambitious and aggressive and fighting it out with big competitors like Yahoo,Hotmail and Gmail.
Regards,
Ajay Sanghani
CEO, ITVidya.com
Cell : 09820020753
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It was a smart move by rediff to announe for Unlimited storage.
Rediff's popularity is only a fraction of that of the giants like MSN, Yahoo and Google...atleast on the global level. So, it knows it can dare to go ahead with this move without actually needing to invest HUGE sums immediately.
If Google declares of unlimited storage, it would send ripples down the Internet world and then Yahoo and MSN would react heavily.
Also, as Vinayak points out, people will not upload huge data their mailing accounts. That space will mostly be utilised for preserving mail. Although the idea of storing all the data on the Internet isn't far off, what with Internet OSes slowly coming out of the Labs.
However, I would like to point out a few things to Vinayak, crossing the 1 GB limit is not a big deal. Try subscribing to the kernel mailing list and see the amount of mails you recieve everyday. Also, rediff already has facilites for domain names, and POP accounts.
Rediff now certainly DOES have a differentiating factor but that still isnt enough to drive users away from yahoo or gmail.
I read this story on rediff.com itself today.
It cannot be used for media storage. Without FTP access any space cannot be used as storage space.People do not send heavy files as attachments anyways. When I say heavy files means files in excess of 50MB. Without such heavy files, it is unlikely that anybody will use even 1GB space in next 5 years.
Rediff can keep its commitment or not, only they can say about it. They must have calculated it from their side as well.
Web interface is key to competing with Gmail & Yahoo. As it requires heavy investment to compete at that level, rediff can position itself differently.
1. Allow users to bring their own domain name and use rediff as backbone. As gmail does.
2. Allow synchronization with outlook or thunderbird at a small fee. Or build up email client software which can be used as offline tool to view & compose emails.
If rediff can get into service level agreement with indian corporate sector, it has huge potential. Google & Yahoo cannot compete there. As almost all businesses in India depend on emails, there is no shortage of clients.
Best luck rediff
Vinayak