« Power to the (shopping) people | Main | An Open Source money scandal? »
April 02, 2005
Gmail sees Yahoo and raises it 1GB
While we probably won't get to the stage where they're paying US to store our mail, there seems no end to the lengths Google and Yahoo will go to attract users to their free mail services.
There's a space battle of sorts going on between the search engine giants. Yesterday, Google lifted its 1GB ceiling on its Inboxes to 2GB - enough to accommodate something like 200,000 text e-mails - just a week after Yahoo quadrupled its free storage to 1GB.
"One gigabyte did seem like a lot," Gmail's product management director George Harik told News.com, "but it turns out there are a lot of heavy users of mail. They send attachments, share photos. It all adds up. We wanted to make sure we have a plan in place for when people reach their storage limit. We don't want people to worry that they might run out."
That seems an unlikely event, because Google signalled that it will go on expanding those Inboxes in the coming months. To which Yahoo spokeswoman, Karen Mahon, responded: "At a certain point beyond 1 gigabyte, it's just a number and becomes irrelevant to most free e-mail users. As an offline analogy: Going beyond a gigabyte for free is like adding a bucket of water into an ocean." No doubt they're already forming their own bucket brigade.
Posted by cw at April 2, 2005 07:19 AM
Comments
I assume they would dynamically allocate storage anyway (they are not going to have millions of megabytes sitting there un-used) so as usage increases, they simply add more storage. The only difference these announcements make is that they can't charge as much any more for "premium" services when the base ones are free. I wonder when .mac will upgrade its size?
Posted by: Alister at April 2, 2005 03:24 PM
Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............Working.............
Posted by: yogendra at July 11, 2006 04:32 PM