Ravi Agrawal, CEO of groupSPARK and my fellow WHIR blogger, thinks there's money to be made in spam filtering:
The opportunity is to upsell customers on "premium" spam filtering technology. I've heard from several hosting providers that their customers are demanding better spam filtering to fight spam 2.0, but in some cases are unwilling to pay additional fees for it. I think it's time that spam filtering ceased to be a commodity and back to being a premium service. After all, isn't spending $1-2 per user per month worth the time saved by the users?
But Om Malik and Brian Walsh are combating spam by using Gmail, rather than asking for help from their hosting providers.
After reading this Techdirt report on Google's new partnership with BSkyB (to offer co-branded Gmail, online video, etc), I suddenly realized that Google and traditional Internet services vendors have completely opposite objectives. As Techdirt says:
BSkyB will be able to use these services to make its cheap, no-frills broadband offering more attractive, and they're what Google's given in trade to be able to lock down the ad inventory of Sky's web properties. That's the real value here for Google -- the ability to sell that ad space, not the extra users of its services it might gain... Google's made similar moves before (deals with Dell, Firefox and Opera being the most prominent) , and will continue to try to sew up market share wherever it can. But it's not just interested in growing the market share of its services like Gmail in these deals, it's interested in grabbing a bigger share of the online ad market.
Think about it: technology is the key revenue generating asset for Ravi and his resellers in the ISP and web hosting industries. Attention is the key revenue generating asset for Google. Google is trading technology for attention, because technology is becoming more abundant (I read recently that storage used to cost $200 per MB back in 1984; we'll probably be down to $200 per TB sooner rather than later), while attention is becoming more scarce.
eWeek says Google is slowly covering the earth, like Sherman Williams paint. It will monopolize attention (which is becoming more valuable), while accelerating the commodization of technology (which is becoming less valuable). Where does this leave traditional technology providers?
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