Email market share has been a discussion topic shortly after the solution came to market (ages ago) and it is also a fun topic for many people.
Although “Email in the cloud” was introduced in the mid-90’s, it now has become a hot topic in the whole email market share discussion. This becomes clear when you look at for example a recent article on LotusLive :
…With LotusLive, launched just a year ago, the effort is to allow people to be able to stay in their in-box and bring work tasks, information, and people together, in context. It has 18 million users today compared to just about 1 million each for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and Google Premier Apps. …
The conclusion looks straightforward :
- 18 M users in Lotus Live
- 1 M in BPOS
- 1 M in GAPE
The question it raises : What are the various platforms and what functionality is offered, licensed and used. So are we comparing apples to apples ?
A second question it raises : which email platform(s) does the vendor offer. Assuming you can only sell so many different email platforms to 1 company, 1 solution is gaining share while the other is loosing right ?
So 2 interesting tables / charts to build would be :
- An overview of email platform(s) offered per vendor
- An All-up market share view of total mailboxes per vendor with maybe a consumer / business split.
Request to all of you interested in this topic :
I will make a start with this but would very much appreciate your comments / tweets to public data sources that can help me figure this out.
