7 hours ago, AndyC wrote
*snip*
There's a use for attachments other than collaborating on a document? Other than simply sending out a file for viewing only?
Believe it or not, versioning. It's a corner case, but it shows the weak point of offloading attachments to some online storage: since that is still under control of the sender, who can change or delete the files, recipients can never be sure that their mail archive is still in a consistent state.
*snip*
That's somewhat misleading, the overall percentage of email done via webmail is going down because more people are using smartphones to access their webmail via rich apps and thus accessing their mail more often. On the PC side of things, pretty much everybody is using a webmail account or makes at least occasional use of webmail (such as OWA when away from their PC). And file services like SkyDrive can improve all scenarios, whether rich apps, webapps or a mixture of the two.
Accessing email through a browser was never a good idea to begin with; it was just a convenient solution back in the internet café era and it survived later as the path of least resistance to keep your mail in one place instead of going through the pains of trying to sync messages across devices (which isn't exactly easy if you don't have the luxury of an Exchange Server or similar). It will be interesting to see where this is going to lead: the lost ad revenues will cause a reaction, eventually...
