Bill Gates Tells Google, “You’re Doing It Wrong” James White April 17, 2011 In his recent book about Google, author Steven Levy discusses an interview he once conducted with Bill Gates on the topic of Gmail. At the time, Gmail boasted 2GB per account. The G-Man stated he couldn’t fathom a single reason to have that much storage space in an e-mail account. Steven Levy told Mr. Gates he personally had already used about half of his account space. Mr. Gates replied, “How could you need more than a gig? What’ve you got in there? Movies? Powerpoint presentations? How many messages are there? Seriously, I’m trying to understand whether it’s the number of messages or the size of messages.” Mr. Levy went on to say that Gates did all the math in his head during their conversation and concluded that Google is doing something wrong. The Microsoft head honcho didn’t see any reason to have more than 1GB of storage space for your e-mail account. I personally am inclined to agree. What do you keep in your e-mail to take up that much space? I keep some funny, personal, and/or picture-filled e-mails in my various accounts. Even if I put all my e-mails in one single account with the spam I don’t read, I would be using something like 121 MB of space. A drop in the bucket for my 5GB at Hotmail, 8GB at Gmail, and virtually unlimited storage at Yahoo. The money wasted on servers for all this space 99.9% of us aren’t using could be put to something constructive like a free backup service or media cloud… or they could bring back Geocities. If you are one of the people using 1GB+ in your e-mail account, delete some junk. Your computer has hundreds of GBs, plenty of room for that funny dog video you got in an e-mail in 2002. And if you are a celebrity or company who encourages people to send you videos, then these services should provide you with corporate e-mail accounts with more space and no file size limits. In fact, I am sure most e-mail provides have this option already. Source: Tom’s hardware Share This With The World!
