Sabeer Bhatia, general manager of Microsoft's Hotmail, could stand to gain from marketing's private label e-mail, but he's deeply skeptical. He has no plans to cobrand his technology. Yahoo and its competitors are trying to be complete online services. They're trying to capture the value of the e-mail traffic. But the strategy absolutely will not work for nonportal brands.
Fads are seductive.
It seems that the owners of big Web sites believe they can just copy the best features from AOL, The Motley Fool or Yahoo, put it all together and get the best of everything. It's a nice dig at the portal potentates of new media. But copying Yahoo won't be the way to beat it. Marketers looking to beef up their sites have lots of places to turn. Privacy Policy Stock data provided by Stockpoint and its data suppliers.