I just read this article on Rediff, detailing the upcoming ventures of Hotmail founder, Sabeer Bhatia. I always thought his hyped status as some sort of biz/tech whizkid was insanely optimistic, but I guess $400m can make anybody feel a tad overconfident. Hotmail was a matter of being at the right place at the right time. It didn’t take killer technology or particularly ingenious ideas, and it wasn’t the first.
Bhatia made an attempt at another business with Arzoo.com, which, as far as I can recall, was something of a marketplace for customers and professionals to trade services. That bombed, but is pending a relaunch “on the lines of Expedia”. His new projects are even more pedestrian:
A Skype wannabe with built-in games. I quote,
“Entertainment has a great opportunity in the country, and this is what is going to be the differentiator considering there are a number of other VoIP providers like Skype, Yahoo, MSN and GoogleTalk,”
Umm… don’t the competitors, barring Skype and Google, also have games and links to gaming content built-in? SkypeOut also does POTS calls plenty cheap, so I’m not sure how much impact the one rupee rate will have.
Another Bhatia project aims to speed up Hotmail, because users are complaining. Can you say Greasemonkey with spyware? Still another project aims to “increase the capacity of Hotmail”, and the article mentions the discrepancy between the email storage space available to Indian and US-resident Hotmail users.
And the icing:
“My services are always free, and I make my money from the advertisement revenue,”
Sweet. Why didn’t I think of that? Sabeer, a word of advice chief: put some of that $400m into a fixed-deposit and get some of that Section 80C loving. I think mutual funds are probably beyond your level of sophistication right now.
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