Yes, email page views mean more revenues – but Gmail still has tiny market share compared to the big boys, and the email PPC model is far from proven yet, and I bet you that the revenues from Gmail are also relatively tiny (see the pre-Business-Week post about one trick ponies).

As for the Grid, there is a world of difference between 2Gb of storage and the Grid. Even if the Grid would come about as a result of online storage (there is a lot more than that required), it smacks of ‘build it [storage] and they will come’ – most users outside our cosy tech community have little use for 2Gb of online storage. The only thing they could store would be music and videos – hardly worth doing when it takes aeons to download stuff even over broadband (I exaggerate, but you know…) – and in Europe at least we are all being migrated slowly to pay-per-megabyte so online storage will not be so free to download/upload.

Raising the storage to 2Gb is nice marketing, but nothing more. If they want Gmail to be revolutionary, let them compete on real features. Ironic that they are forced to compete on storage, when they specifically said a year ago that the point of 1Gb was to make storage a non-issue. And why do they still pussyfoot around with 1Gb or 2Gb, why don’t they say 10 or 100 or limitless? The ‘cute’ chart shows the gap between the spiel and the reality – let them stop messing around with limits and just give out that infinity+1.

So what did Rifkin learn from this whole ordeal? That whining incessantly to Google pays off… eventually.

Take my email. Please.