little surprises
I’m always interested in those little unexpected moments when you realize that your own experience is less common, less “normal,” than you had thought. This can happen in dozens of ways: for instance, it was only all the talk about the last season of The Sopranos that made me realize just how many people have HBO, and how unusual I am (in at least some of the circles I frequent) in not having it.
Here’s my Little Surprise of the Day: I was reading this blog post about the proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo, and saw in the chart at the bottom of the post that Yahoo Mail has over fifty percent of the American email market while Gmail has less than six percent. Less than six percent? Are you kidding? Three-quarters of the people I correspond with (or so it feels) use Gmail. How did my experience get so skewed from the norm? Are we Gmail users a bunch of weirdos? And, if so, just what kind of weirdos? (And, whole we’re at it, how could anyone prefer the hideously ad-strewn UI of Yahoo Mail?)
Maybe it’s because people don’t realize that Gmail is no longer invite only. Or maybe we’re just mail snobs.
— J. G. Pair · Feb 9, 02:13 AM · #
More likely it’s because Yahoo handles the 10’s of millions of email accounts for a bunch of broadband internet providers, such as AT&T, Verizon and Rogers.
— Bo · Feb 9, 02:25 AM · #
I have both: yahoo for comments and other online registration crap where my address might be spammed, and gmail for friends.
— MLH · Feb 9, 06:42 AM · #
Wow. That is quite an unexpected imbalance.
I’m with you on not understanding why so many people subscribe to HBO. I had the dangdest time trying to cancel my cable subscription about two years ago. The sales representative evidently thought I was going to switch to satellite or something, and she kept trying to offer me free HBO for three months or something like that. I had to keep saying, “No, you don’t understand, I’m definitely not interested in HBO or anything extra — what I want is to NOT have TV at all.”
— Stuart Buck · Feb 9, 07:34 AM · #
I wonder how they measure the “email market.” I’m pretty sure that I have, somewhere, at least two or three old Yahoo addresses that I picked up for one reason or another. But they’ve long been dismissed. It might be more interesting – if you could get the data – to ask how much each company makes off their email-related advertising.
Not having TV certainly makes one unusual, but I’ve found I get the “huh?” look quite often when I admit that I don’t have ESPN…
— Michael Simpson · Feb 9, 05:28 PM · #