Don’t Forget About Yahoo!

With all the news about the Googles and MySpaces in the consumer space, it’s sometimes easy to forget about Yahoo!, which made some recent additions to its popular consumer e-mail app over the weekend.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo! has now made it possible for you to send text messages from your keyboard, a function that should be welcome to those of you whose thumbs begin to cramp from PDA or cell phone typing fatigue.

As the link above mentions, “the enhancements make it easier to send e-mail, instant messages or text messages from a single Web site – no need to launch or toggle between separate applications or devices. The features will be available to users in the United States, Canada, India and the Philippines.”

In March, Yahoo!, feeling pressure from Microsoft’s Hotmail and Google’s Gmail, also offered free unlimited storage, a welcomed sign for those of you who philosophically believe it’s silly to have to delete an e-mail (count me in with that school of thought).

With all these great features being added to consumer-based e-mail, how much longer can corporate IT go without adopting web-based mail like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail that actually allow you to search effectively (and now, IM and text colleagues cell phones)? The perceived security gap between hosted e-mail and on-premise will also evaporate over time, and maybe even sooner than one might think (the Google/postini deal comes to mind).

As e-mail becomes more marginalized due to the emerging use of IM and blogging, you have to wonder when IT managers will pull the plug on making their employees do a “control-F” to find old e-mails in their installed corporate e-mail apps that seem so vastly inefficient compared to these innovative consumer e-mail apps.