1. I need a mail host that can stand up under the kind of mailbomb/DDOS attacks that shut me down twice in the past year.
2. Similarly, I want to diversify my email addresses among two providers, rather than leaving them all with my general web hosting company.
3. David Ferris first wrote up Google Mail outsourcing, with a favorable view, last July. And some of his criticisms (e.g., lack of IMAP support) have already been rectified.
4. What’s more — as I remarked last night, David and his associate Richi Jennings have been voting with their feet, and moving their own email to Google. That’s an impressive endorsement. Ferris Research is a serious rival to Gartner as an analyst firm covering email, and Richi — who evidently LOVES Gmail — has also carved out a non-trivial identity as an expert in his own right.
5. Free sounds good, compared with the alternatives.

Now that I’ve gone ahead with the move to Google Mail, here are some scattered thoughts:

• Some terminology: Technically, Google Mail is part of the Google Apps service. And the terms “Google Mail” and “Gmail” are pretty interchangeable (you even have two choices of server name when setting up POP3 access).
• Google’s UI to get started can be a bit confusing. But googling on Google Apps will get you to the right place, namely this link.
• Particularly confusing is dealing with the MX records. My domain registrar didn’t seem to offer a way to redirect them at all. The cpanel interface for redirecting MX at my hosting company wasn’t very good; Google asks for about 7 entries of declining priority, but cpanel only makes it easy to enter 1. (I wound up asking my hosting company’s support to make sure all the entries were listed that should be.)
• If there’s a way to sort messages by subject or sender in Gmail online, I haven’t found it. That’s a major oversight if it can’t be done, or a minor one if it’s merely too hard to figure out how to do it.
• Setting up POP3 access has some steps that aren’t present in, say, setting up POP3 via a typical hosting company. You need to go into “Settings” and explicitly enable POP3 access. You also need to explicitly enable SSL in your mail client (on Eudora, the default setting did NOT work). Basically, you need to open this page or something similar, and actually look at the steps for your client. Chances are one or two will be non-obvious.

That’s about it for now. In particular, I haven’t done anything yet with Google Mail’s search capabilities. More on that down the road, perhaps.

Richard, however, goes further, thinking that Google could succeed in PCs used mainly to run word processing, spreadsheets, etc.. His arguments include:

• Google has a well-regarded brand name. Check.
• Google might be able to make them cheaply, and even if they couldn’t, they could contract out the manufacture. Check.
• Google wouldn’t be burdened with Microsoft bloatware, and hence could make really cheap PCs. Hmm. There’s some truth to that, although it also is the case that some of that bloat provides actual functionality. And there might be more actual functionality in the future – e.g., speech recognition.
• Google is great at UIs, and could fix UIs like desktop Linux’s. Umm, I’m not sure Google is particularly great at UIs. But anybody with a decent usability lab should be able to turn out something that is, well, usable. Besides, if you ask my fellow posters on Slashdot, there isn’t anything wrong with Linux’s UI anyway.
• Their SaaS nature gives Google’s apps a big leg up on Microsoft Office. Hmm. First of all, to the extent you keep data on Google servers, you have to worry about Big Brother. The way things are going, that’s not a concern to dismiss lightly, no matter what your home country may be. That potentially major detail aside, SaaS is goodness. But it would take some pretty clever marketing to convince consumers it was an actual advantage. What’s more, the most obvious area of advantage – collaboration – is one that will also immediately bring privacy concerns to the fore. Assuming consumers actually care about privacy, of course …

As for Google’s ability to execute – well, they’re doing a very mixed job with the Google search appliance. At the high end of the market, it’s a joke, in terms of functionality and marketing alike. But in Microsoft-like manner, it’s eating into the low end due to its price and the company’s reputation.

So I’m not sure where I come down on this, except to ask – is the PC even the right device to think about? Or would a mobile device – video/music player, etc. – make more sense?

But on the other hand – what exactly is Google’s sustainable advantage?

Are Google’s search results still better than Microsoft’s? Probably not by much, and probably not in a sustainable way. It takes a lot of money and a lot of searches (because you need to be able to examine the search logs) to compete with Google in search quality, but Microsoft has an ample supply of both.

Does Google have significant customer lock-in? I don’t see a lot of lock-in for search, whether on the user or advertiser side. Gmail is Google’s only other important, successful product to date. And while it may have achieved some lock-in, a web-based email system that truly integrated well with Outlook would eclipse it instantly.

And so, while Richard makes a persuasive case that we can’t just assume Microsoft will catch up, it’s not at all clear to me either why we should just assume that Google can stay ahead.

What can the rest of us do to help overcome Chinese censorship?

In the 1980s, Western information flow was huge in bringing down the Iron Curtain. The main influence was free TV, undermining communist-regime propaganda by showing how people in the West lived (much more affluently than in the East, for starters). George Soros also famously donated copiers, fax machines, etc., which seem to have been a nontrivial aid to internal information flow.

China of course is more open today than communist countries were then. TV, movies, travel, the uncensored part of the internet — they all help ensure a reasonably high level of understanding of Western thought and Western information. Even so, the Chinese government tightly controls discussion of — and access to infomation about — certain sensitive political issues, such as democracy, Taiwan, Tibet, etc., just as several Arab governments do on their favorite hotbutton issues.

But we in the West, if we choose, should be able to overcome that censorship! We can’t even keep ourselves from getting unwanted information — email spam, search engine results spam, etc. Getting information to Chinese people who want it should, by comparison, be straightforward. (I’ll write up a post with a specific plan shortly; the URL should appear in the trackback section to this post.) That’s where effort and attention need to go.

Back to Blodgett’s question. As a number of insightful links and comments in Blodgett’s thread illustrate, Google’s decision about whether or not to cooperate was not an easy one. I really only have two observations to add to those there. First, this isn’t just about short-term revenue and market presence. It’s also about developing technology cost-effectively that will be useful in any future Chinese endeavors under any future Chinese regime.

Second, that technology development point cuts both ways. Google will be training a lot of smart Chinese engineers in exactly the skills they’d need to make automated censorship more effective. And for that reason, I think Google should have stayed away.

Since I also favor proactive steps to fight censorship, I guess that puts me in Blodgett’s “Option III” group.

The Register is highly skeptical of the rumored Google PC. Admittedly, it’s playing in the intersection of several areas with bad track records, including:

• Non-Windows PCs
• PCs special-branded for mass-market retailers
• PCs branded by search vendors

Even so, I think there’s a lot of potential for this idea.

To see why, please consider that there basically are four major uses for home PCs:

1. Work-at-home
2. Gaming
3. Internet/communication
4. Schoolwork

Presumably, people won’t look to get their work-at-home or gaming PCs at Wal-Mart. That leaves internet/communication and schoolwork. Well, Google is one heckuva heavyweight in internet/communication. If you want a machine to do web surfing, email, instant messaging, and so on, why exactly would Dell/HP/Microsoft be more attractive suppliers than Google?

And how does one do schoolwork on a PC? There’s a lot of internet use, some lightweight use of word processors and other personal productivity tools, and occasionally some use of specialized software (e.g., development tools if you’re learning programming, or various kinds of educational java applets in all sorts of disciplines). Any good machine for communication can meet all those needs perfectly well.

What about IE-only websites, you might ask? Well, the only reason those survive outside Redmond is either total idiocy on the part of webmasters, or a smug reliance on the fact that everybody has IE available at least as a backup browser. But the thing is — they don’t. Mac support for IE has been dropped, and there still are a bunch of Macs out there. IE-only sites, already on the decline, can be expected to dwindle away fast. This is no longer a serious barrier to non-Windows PCs.

Another change from the past is the role of ISPs. These days, there is no role for ISPs, at least in the US. Internet connectivity is being taken over by the telephone and cable TV companies. And they’re just as (in)capable of supporting non-Windows PCs as they are of supporting Windows connections.

Most likely, the Google PC will fizzle at first simply because neither Google nor Wal-Mart really knows how to market it. Besides, the idea of Google as a complete provider of Microsoft-alternative software is slightly futuristic. But if they take their lumps, come back with Version 2 quickly, and then follow Microsoft-like with a kickass Version 3, Google could make a serious dent in Microsoft’s market share.

So that’s the Google threat to Microsoft. Coming soon (I hope) — a post on the Microsoft threat to Google.