Skip to main content

Email still ‘crucial’ for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft

gmail-logoSome say email is a dying technology, shunned to the corners of the Internet only trafficked by geriatrics from a time long gone; replaced by social networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But that’s just not true. In fact, according to a new study by Swedish uptime monitoring service Pingdom, email remains a massively important business for the providers of the world’s largest free email services: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Traffic counts by Alexa show that visitors to the mail.google.com subdomain account for the second largest chunk of Google’s web traffic — 23.33 percent — which follows only Google.com itself. The same goes for Microsoft’s mail.live.com subdomain, which accounts for 39.12 percent of all traffic. For Yahoo, its mail.yahoo.com subdomain receives more traffic than any other subdomain owned and operated by the company.

Recommended Videos

In terms of actual numbers, Yahoo Mail has about 340 million users worldwide. Microsoft’s Hotmail has 450 million. Google does not reveal its exact number of total worldwide users, but estimates place it at somewhere between 200 million and Yahoo’s 340 million.

All of this translates into big business for these companies, which rely upon both advertising and user data for their money-making purposes.

Many predicted that Facebook would deliver the death blow to email last year with the launch of “Project Titan,” the social network giant’s custom email service, which also incorporates Facebook messages and texts. That service, or some iteration of it, may eventually kill (other kinds of) email, or at least give it a bad beating. But the service is still rolling out to Facebook’s nearly 600 million users, so it hasn’t yet had a chance to really fight.

It’s true that younger people don’t use email the way adults do — just ask anyone below legal drinking age email, and they’ll look at you like a deer in headlights. But that doesn’t mean much. Email is still extremely useful, especially for business purposes, which youngsters haven’t yet had a chance to experience. So, in short, email still wins, but the streak can’t last forever. What will take its place, however, remains to be seen.

Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
Gmail may add a handy temporary email address feature
Moto G 5G (2024) in Sage Green showing Gmail.

Future Gmail versions could include support for temporary email addresses if Google ever enables this feature that has been discovered within its app code.

Android Authority discovered the feature, referred to as “Shielded Email,” within the code of the recent 24.45.33 release of the Google Play Services APK. The publication detailed that its APK teardown revealed several clues about how the feature would work.

Read more
Google Sheets vs. Microsoft Excel: Which is better?
Microsoft's PowerPoint on the Vision Pro.

Workplace visualization tools make the world go round, and will definitely liven up your before-lunch presentation. If you’ve got hard numbers to display to the masses, or graph-scribed projections you’re eager to get onscreen, you’ll need a powerful spreadsheet. You can use Google Sheets, or you can use Microsoft Excel -- they're both great ways to get the job done. But which of these two platforms is truly the best option? That depends on a number of things, and we’re not here to dissuade or encourage, but merely to inform.

We actually love Google Sheets and Excel, but for different reasons. One software may not be ideal for A, B, and C, although it may be really good at D, E, and F. Whatever the case may be, we put together this comparison of Google Sheets and Excel, with focus paid to essential categories like application access, data analysis, and charts and graphs. 
The basics
It’s worth stating from the start that both Sheets and Excel are excellent spreadsheet applications. So if you have the opportunity to try them both out, you may have a clear preference from the start. But if you’re doing your research first, just know that you can’t go wrong with either.

Read more
Microsoft Word vs. Google Docs
A person using a laptop that displays various Microsoft Office apps.

For the last few decades, Microsoft Word has been the de facto standard for word processors across the working world. That's finally starting to shift, and it looks like one of Google's productivity apps is the heir apparent. The company's Google Docs solution (or to be specific, the integrated word processor) is cross-platform and interoperable, automatically syncs, is easily shareable, and perhaps best of all, is free.

However, using Google Docs proves it still has a long way to go before it can match all of Word's features -- Microsoft has been developing its word processor for over 30 years, after all, and millions still use Microsoft Word. Will Google Docs' low barrier to entry and cross-platform functionality win out? Let's break down each word processor in terms of features and capabilities to help you determine which is best for your needs.
How does each word processing program compare?
To put it lightly, Microsoft Word has an incredible advantage over Google Docs in terms of raw technical capability. From relatively humble beginnings in the 1980s, Microsoft has added new tools and options in each successive version. Most of the essential editing tools are available in Google Docs, but users who are used to Word will find it limited.

Read more