How to counter Hotmail and Gmail free mail service?

It has been a very busy month. It's great to be busy! Ha.

Today, my colleague brought me to attention the new offering from Hotmail. Microsoft highlighted that this is the next generation of personal email.

The new release of Hotmail targets the following 4 core areas:

1. Take back your inbox. 
2. Get more done with the mail you receive. 
3. Share over email. 
4. Connect from your phone.

Some of the highlights are:

With Hotmail, we’ve combined the simplicity of sending photos through email with the power of Windows Live SkyDrive so that you can send up to 200 photos, each up to 50 MB in size, all in a single email.

Just as you do with photos, you can send up 200 Office documents of up to 50 MB each. Send PowerPoint presentations embedded with videos, Word documents rich with images, and more.

Amazing! The storage vendors are earning big bucks from Microsoft. :)


Anyway, we have our own OpenMail.SG offering. What should we do? Go panic and offer the same as what Microsoft or Google offer?

How to? Being small, you do not confront your enemies with your weakness. This is from the famous Sun Tzu Art of War.

Our direction should be very clear: We do not react by lowering our price or offer features which we are not financially capable of offering.

The key to retaining our existing customers and winning more customers is: Customer Service.

If you treat your customers well, there is no reason for them to leave you. Cost is secondary.

.