Google announced tonight that it will up its Gmail limit to 2 GB, and that it plans to increase the limit to…the sky. Really. This is not an April Fools’ joke. I spoke to Google PR, and they told me that they shortly intend to lift the limit entirely on Gmail – well, not entirely, but they hope to allow as much as possible – which in the end, I was told, makes it pretty much limitless. Google Grid, ho! (I did ask them about the abuse of this feature – and they told me they’d get back to me….). BTW, the Gmail site has a cute (I hate that word, but it fits) doodle on the whole idea. Image at left.
Not to beat a tired horse, but why do this? Mail = pageviews. Pageviews = profits. Rinse. Repeat.
you’re right about the motives. Emial is my most used service on the net. And it’s one of the few places where I actually click ads
Thank goodness. I’ve been whining about the 1 Gig email quota for the better part of 9 months.
So what did Rifkin learn from this whole ordeal? That whining incessantly to Google pays off… eventually.
Take my email. Please.
John, when Google launched Gmail they did say that they set it to 1Gb but ultimately they wanted it to be limitless. So the concept behind this is not new, even if the implementation is. I bet that if you take out all the users who are industry insiders, or who code Mozilla for fun, or who have ten laptops in a LAN at home, the number of people using anywhere near 1Gb is miniscule. So 2Gb, to Joe Average, is nothing more than psychological.
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.
My gmail account is now at 2051 mb and growing. But the rate of growth is down dramatically from yesterday. At the current rate it looks like I’ll get about 3 MB of additional space a day, or another 1 GB over the next year. Cool!
i have got one virtual drive with gmail.with 2 gb
it’s also cool http://www.csglobal.co.in