E-Dribble

New Hotness: Farming out the service to a provider that does it for free, but continuing to charge the fee.

Added pizazz: Putting a spin on it in your notices to customers to make it seem like it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

Wildblue obviously has been busy optimizing this process:

From the Wildblue notice:

We have exciting news! WildBlue is proud to announce that we are partnering with Google to provide great new email functionality and a brand new WildBlue.net home page.

Home Page
Your new WildBlue.net home page will bring you a mix of news, weather, sports, and entertainment, plus powerful new features that you can customize, all brought to you through a single web page powered by Google. You’ll get the latest services from Google, including Google Calendar, Google Page Creator, Google Talk, Google Docs, and more than 2,000 Google Gadgets that you can add to your customized home page. We think you’re going to love all the new Google features.

E-mail
Your email addresses will remain the same, and will be powered through Google’s popular Gmail tool. We will automatically convert all your existing email addresses to the Google Gmail service. Each of your email addresses will get over 5.7 GB of storage and counting. This is over 50 times more storage space than you have now so you can keep all your favorite photos and large email attachments. For many customers, this means you’ll never have to delete an email again!

Web Space
Our new web page tool will be provided through Google Page Creator, which will allow you to create your own customized web pages using easy-to-use templates and tools. Most users will be able to easily re-create their web pages after the transition to Google.

Sincerely,

Ed Knudson
Vice President, Marketing & Sales

Please note that there is no mention of a savings for the customer since Wildblue no longer has to handle email, file storage or customer web pages. Also missing was the statement that all of these services are already provided by Google to the rest of the world at no charge.

They did however wish me a happy holidays at the end of the email. I guess that has to count for something.

I don’t use any of the services that they are discussing in the email, so in practice this change doesn’t affect me in the least. In theory however, it bothers me. What if I were to do the same thing?

Dear customer,

Great news? In an effort to make you happier than any person should have the right to be, WeHostAndDesignForYou.com has implemented the following features to make your experience with us a better one:

Design:
BobsHouseOfFreeDesign.com will now be providing the design services for you. That’s right! All of the great features that you’ve come to love will now be handled by Bob!’

Hosting:
Geocities.com is now the hosting entity for your websites. World renown for ingenious presentation of crass banner ads, our partnership with Geocities allows us to provide you the hosting service we could never provide on our own but always charged you for.

Billing:
We will continue handling the billing process.

On second thought, it could be considered a stroke of genius.