Wise Startup Blog

Engadget and TechCrunch both picked up the story from DownloadSquad, and I thought I should weigh in on the comments from Mark over at Tech Crunch:

We’ll have to see how Google plans to monetize Gmail with IMAP, since enabling IMAP means that people like me will almost never bother to use the webmail interface, and therefore never see Google advertisements. Maybe they are betting that most people will simply not use IMAP, or maybe they have other advertising tricks up there sleeves. Perhaps it’s too early to speculate until we actually see this feature enabled for everyone.

Now, to me, it seems pretty obvious how Gmail can monetize this; let me run through a couple of scenarios:

Right now I use .Mac over Gmail for the IMAP support

I’ve been hopping from client to client lately, and have ended up back directly where I started, using Apple Mail with .Mac IMAP support.

I had toyed with the idea of a centralized, gmail web account, but just found the access to be way too slow.

Now that there is IMAP, I can ditch .Mac, use imap.gmail.com to keep my accounts sync, and get this, go on Gmail.com if I’m ever at another computer !

Formerly, when all my mail was on .Mac, I had no reason to go to gmail (all the mail was being forwarded to .Mac)

Allow Folder Support for Google Docs

I’ve been using Google Docs more and more lately, simply for the reason that it allows me to have 1 copy of documents across my computers.

So, say I had access to those documents through an IMAP folder system, and could edit , or email them from my client, well, heck, that would probably want to make me use Google Docs even more, which = more $.

Charge Money for IMAP Access

I know Google hates to do this, except for licensing and enterprise purposes, but I’m sure if they rolled out a $5/month feature for no ad-supported service, users would jump all over this.

Additionally, to keep with the google mantage, they could also offer IMAP with a oh-so-notorious Hotmail ad at the bottom (please, don’t be this stupid).

Get People to Rely on Google For Everything, So they Can’t Give it Up (Hello Tobacco Industry)

If I have all of my business going through Google with docs, gmail, adwords, I’m sure some economies of scale, and bundled services will rear their head.

With Google’s recent push for storage space, it wouldn’t be too ridiculous to see Google offering domain hosting, gmail email support (is already happening), and corporate licensing of Google Gears+Docs.

So, the lesson is, if you offer a great product, people will use it, people will pay for it, and you can profit off it.