Email anyone?

The announcement of the proposed 1malaysia email address for all Malaysians has certainly drawn a largely negative reaction amongst the cybertroopers in the local scene. The twitter discussions were certainly cautious to be politically correct, if not suspicious.

First of all, being an email service provider is not something that is simple. There was certainly no real need for one judging from the sophistication that is Gmail. And the 50 million ringgit it allegedly cost on the first glance sounded expensive, but in the real term it was cheap, and too be honest, too cheap to be true. And true to all Malaysian projects, we are always very keen to set things up, but when it came to maintenance, we tend to lag behind. I can see it as being the case here.

Every time a Minister says something, we hailed it as sage and never question it, no matter how stupid was. We put it up there as the best thing since sliced bread. This project is doomed to fail. It will at best become another one of those half-baked. It looked good on the outside, but it will be one he'll of a challenge to get it done. And the shame of it all, it was one of those challenges which was not worth the effort. We could have done much better by investing in the infrastructure of our broadband services. Look at Singapore. They are much better at broadband than us, and our Minister did not even acknowledge it as such. Once the broadband service is up to scratch, then we can have that 1malaysia email service as a beta. Learn a thing or two in terms of its viability, then launch it as at national level. No more of this Malaysia Boleh thing. We'll save that for next summer's Olympics.