As the weekend approaches, we’re all looking forward to that feeling we get when we’ve just polished off the last of the pizza, we’re 2 hours into a Family Guy marathon on TiVo, and the phone rings but we’re too lazy to get up and fetch it, even it is our sister on the line telling us she’s just given birth to a baby boy.

That feeling, in more scientific terms, is known as inertia, or the tendency of a body at rest to stay at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force.

Greg Sterling of The Kelsey Group has a post today called Search Engines, Brand and Inertia in which he talks about the relatively unchanged state of the search engine market share among the major players. He cites factors such as the uniformity of search engine results and the fact that Google’s market share hasn’t budged, despite significant competitor efforts to the contrary, as indicators that it’s now more about brand and user comfort than anything.

Extending this point further, you could say the same thing about email adoption. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, now that Hotmail and Yahoo have added extra storage, many people are less willing to give up email addresses they’ve had for years. Even if they do open up new accounts, they still might use them for other purposes other than their main email (as a spam email for filling in forms, job-hunting email, etc.).

As a former Google employee, I had every incentive in the world to give up my Hotmail and get on board with Gmail. Though I tried for the first few weeks, trying to enforce the ‘hey guys, use my new email now’ thing with my friends and family got to be a pain. Once I found out Hotmail was going to give me just as much storage, and twice as many people already knew my email address and could use it without incident, I had little reason to switch. Inertia, indeed.

These days I give people my Gmail when I know I’m going to recieve a very large file. Otherwise it’s just easier to use Hotmail. But I still feel kinda like an amateur having that domain appended to my email name. After reading this article titled E-Mail Addresses Say Lots About You, I realize for once my neurotic fears may be well-founded.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Search: Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.