Since Google launched Gmail last year with it’s 1Gig of storage space, competing services from Yahoo and Microsoft have been scrambling to ramp up storage capacity – in Yahoo’s case from 2Mb to 1 Gig. Now, apparently in an attempt to take the wind out of their competitior’s marketing sails, Gmail is one-upping them again by pushing storage to 2 Gigs and beyond… From the Gmail site:
Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn’t mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we’re giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people’s lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more.
This is awesome. Google is destroying their competitors because they have no premium service to sell. 98% of Google’s revenue comes from targeted advertising. They have no reason to reserve more storage space or bandwidth or features for paying customers. And given that bandwidth and storage costs are dropping at exponential rates, it costs them so little to offer the upgrades.
Personally, I’ve moved all my correspondence to my Gmail account. It’s just such a great service. The SPAM filters are amazing, the interface is responsive, and I can store anything I want for as long as I want and access it from anywhere. And I’m one of those people who never deletes an email – I have correspondence dating back to 1996 – that’s a lot of data and it’s growing all the time.