Re: Abuse response [Was: RE: Yahoo Mail Update]

[Greg Skinner <gds () gds best vwh net>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 03:39:05PM -0400, Joe Abley wrote:
> On 16 Apr 2008, at 13:33 , Simon Waters wrote:
>
> > Ask anyone in the business "if I want a free email account who do I  
> > use.." and you'll get the almost universal answer Gmail.
>
> I think amongst those not in the business there are regional trends,  
> however. Around this neck of the woods (for some reason) the answer  
> amongst your average, common-or-garden man in the street is "yahoo!".
>
> I don't know why this is. But that's my observation.

In my experience, Gmail tends to be the preferred freemail acount
among geeks and techies.  Y! mail and Hotmail are preferred by the
(non-techie) man and woman on the street.  I think this is largely due
to branding.

> So, with respect to your other comments, correlation between technical/ 
> operational competence and customer choice seems weak, from my  
> perspective. If there's competition, it may not driven by service  
> quality, and the conclusion that well-staffed abuse desks promote  
> subscriber growth is, I think, faulty.

Also, IME, the business community tends to perceive marketing as a
profit center (whether or not it actually is), because they understand
it and can measure the ROI they get from it.  This may not be the case
in companies with executives who came from the tech side, however, but
it's still more common for executives to have more of a business than
technical background.

--gregbo