Cry, "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war -- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar III.i.270

It's a voyeuristic world. Sadistic joys of destruction arousing forbidden pleasures, igniting the embers of the deepest desires. So what if its digital blood. The pleasure is all real. Three giants, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, pitted against each other. Three parties witnessing the digital gore, you the reader, the webprenuers, citizens of the net whose economic fate is to be decided, me a columnist and a chronicler savouring every moment of this war. Havoc. The orgy has just begun. Welcome to the World Wide Web War 1. New action every week, guaranteed!

If the last week belonged to Yahoo, this week it's Google's turn. Birthday boy Gmail has announced a superb return present. A 100% increase in its email capacity, which translates into 2 gigabyte of email storage capacity.

The new "Infinity+1" storage plan doubles the Gmail space allocation from 1 GB and also adds rich text formatting in emails. On their website, Google says that they plan to increase the storage space "beyond" 2 GBs, and a running counter on the Gmail website shows a current allocation of 2054 megabytes.

Google does it better

If MSN can do it, Yahoo does it better. If Yahoo can do it, Google does it best. Just last week I wrote my column titled Google versus Yahoo versus MSN when Yahoo decided to increase its email capacity a full four hundred percent to match Google's Gmail offer of 1 Gb. Of course, yesterday Google decided to make that history with its 2 Gb offer.

The war mode

Two years and 4 months less. A war, a subliminal one at that, has been on, with acquisitions, mergers and more. The players are giants, the big daddies of the Internet. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. The territory is the World Wide Web and the battlefield is sometimes the super lucrative search engine market, at other times the email services and at yet other times, other sundry web services.

Just the last 10 days has seen much buzz with Yahoo wishing to buy Flickr, a Web site that has won considerable buzz among the digerati as a place to store and share digital photography. Shortly afterward, Hewlett-Packard unveiled a deal to buy a similar company, Snapfish. Another interesting news is of IAC/InterActiveCorp's agreement to pay $ 1.85 billion for Ask Jeeves, the butler search engine. Noteworthy is something I mentioned last time "acquisition that too of a search engine in these times of war. What's the inside story?" I promise to be back with that soon. For now getting back on the email market.

The email market

As things stand today: Yahoo Mail, available in 15 languages in almost two dozen countries around the world, gives users 2 gigabytes of storage for US $ 20 a year.

Microsoft Corp offers 250 megabytes of storage to users of its free MSN Hotmail accounts. Like Yahoo, it offers 2 gigabytes of storage for an annual fee of US $ 20.

Google's Gmail now offers 2 Gb of space. It also directly affects both the above.

Noteworthy is that while Yahoo and Hotmail offers accounts to just anybody who comes to their website, Gmail requires an invite. In other words, if you are on a digital island, you may never get to use a Gmail account. What's Gmail's strategy? Why is Google offering such a mega digital warehouse? More on this later.

Puneet Mehrotra edits MidnightEdition.com and is a web strategist at www.website-promotion.in He is also a columnist on New Economy for HindustanTimes.com.

You can email at ebiz333@yahoo.com