What do business users want from an email client?I would like to do a survey, and I hope that people will provide me with some feedback on what they like about different email clients. We, at Bynari, would like to create a web client that provides the core functions that most people need in business. Here is what we know about email clients. Source: http://fingerprintapp.com (Sept 2008) Microsoft Outlook has the largest market share, 36%, and most corporations are using it as their primary client. Hotmail has the next largest market share with 33%. Yahoo mail is third with 14% market share, but as many of you already know, Google’s Gmail is becoming widely popular and gaining market share, 6%. The current trend for email clients seems to be pointing to the web. It is either because the web clients are free and convenient OR it is preferred because of the features. Common sense points to the former not the latter. I believe that most people use the web client out of convenience. I have been using Yahoo mail for years not because it provides me with great interface or features, but because it is always available and can be accessed from any browser. I also have a Gmail account, but I rarely use it. Out of laziness, I do not want to change my email address and have to email everyone in my address book that my email address has changed. Other reasons are that I do not want to have to backup my email or worry about losing data. I also do not want to manage it or migrate it to a new email system. Then, there is Outlook. From a developer’s perspective, what I do not like about Outlook is that it is proprietary software that is not particularly well written. Every developer who has written a plug-in for Outlook could tell you horror stories about crashes after crashes for absolutely no reason. Memory seg faults just to name a few issues are common with Outlook. Every version of Outlook has its own personality and very little consistency exists between versions. From a business user’s perspective, many users have ‘grown up’ with Outlook since it is integrated with the Microsoft Office suite and are used to the quirks and limitations of Outlook. Even with the quirks, Outlook has a lot of great sharing features for business users. It still maintains the leadership position, however their market share is steadily eroding due to the rise of web clients. As I have mentioned, I have a Gmail account and have used the collaboration features as well as basic email functions. I do not see anything remarkably different about it versus other web clients. I noticed that I could not copy and paste from the Gmail client to my Yahoo client. It could be a bug…I did not have the time to pursue it. I know that Gmail has some office type applications built in. It looks very similar to Microsoft’s Office products but more of a stripped down version. So the question is, what would business customers want from an email client? How do business customers define collaboration in an email environment? Do business users want a web client that can do calendar and contacts sharing with other email clients like Outlook and Gmail? What features will be useful? What tools would be helpful for users? More research coming soon… |
