Thursday, April 01, 2004
This is still doing the rounds ;-)
BBC NEWS | Business | Google plans rival e-mail service:
"Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, plans to offer an e-mail service called Gmail in a bid to rival Yahoo and Microsoft's Hotmail.
The new service promises to take away the need to delete unwanted messages and organise e-mail according to topic.
The service is still being tested and not yet generally available, but will be offered for free on www.gmail.com.
Google mail provides one gigabyte of storage - many times more than existing rivals that also offer free e-mail. "
So one user = 1Gb. Two users = 2GB. 1000 users = 1 Terrabyte. 1,000,000 users = 1 Pentabyte server.
Gmail, if it is real, would need at least a 10 Pentabyte server. Or, put another way, 50,000 200Gb hard drives. That's a *lot* of storage. And that's if only 10 million sign up.
A 200Gb HDD is about $100. So that's 50,000 x 100, $5 million just for storage.
I'm not *convinced* this is an April Fool's joke, but if it is it has gone *everywhere*.
BBC, Evening Standard, Slashdot etc etc etc.
Besides, there is already a product called Gmail, it is a Gnome Mail client on Linux.
