Yahoo ramps up email storage
Yahoo ramps up email storage
As part of an overhaul of its email service, Yahoo is set to offer its paid email customers what it describes as "virtually unlimited storage", with free users to be upgraded to 100MB of capacity.
News of the enhanced service comes a little over a month after rival search engine Google said it was to launch a free email service called Gmail that would offer users 1GB of storage. As the announcement was made on April Fools Day, many industry observers thought it was a hoax, considering that Yahoo only offers 4MB of storage to free users in comparison. Google has since been at pains to stress that it was no ruse and that it is going to offer such a service.
Meanwhile, Yahoo has also announced the results of a study it commissioned into the technology purchasing habits of small to medium sized businesses (SMEs), which clearly indicate that while SMBs' need for key business technologies is consistent with larger enterprise companies, the purchase process is markedly different.
"Small and medium-size businesses spend more than $75 billion per year on technology, but have remained an elusive segment for technology marketers due to the impracticality of reaching out to each SMB individually," said Elizabeth Harz, category development officer for technology advertising, Yahoo. "The Internet has become a key resource for SMBs to learn about perspective technology purchases, which makes it an ideal medium for the technology vendors that rely on marketing efforts, rather than personal contact, to reach this segment."
SMBs consider technology to be critical to their success, with 88 percent agreeing that it is important to keep up with the latest technology trends. Despite the importance placed on technology, only one-third of businesses with 20-49 employees have a full-time IT professional (a figure that increases to 50 percent in companies of 50-99 employees, and to more than 90 percent for SMBs with 100 plus employees).
When asked what factors are "very important" when making technology purchase decisions, 90 percent of SMBs listed "reliability," 83 percent cited "high quality," and 79 percent wanted the product to be "trustworthy." These brand attributes are considered the "cost of entry" for this segment because without them, a product will not receive strong purchase consideration. The research also showed that SMBs need to feel that the technology is a good value and that the company cares about the SMB business.
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