RE: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Google Gmail...

[Dave Lloyd <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Jonathan King wrote:

> If this is a joke, it's a really, really, *really* elaborate joke.  
> I actually did the math, and it's pretty clear that it would take 
> even me like 10 years or so to fill up a 1 GB space.  (Calculation:
> 100 messages / day x 10 years x 365 days/year x 3000 bytes/message 
> ~= 1 GB.)  Most accounts will contain much less than that (I'm 
> having good thoughts about 50 MB).  So let's pretend they can fit 20 
> users into 1 GB of space.  That's 20,000 users per TB, and a 
> Terabyte of disk probably costs them a couple thousand on the 
> outside in hardware.  If the cost of running the service is ten 
> times the hardware cost per year, that gets me a total cost of $1 
> per user per year.  *Maybe* I'm low by a factor of 10.  In that 
> case, the cost per user is like $10 per year, or under $3 billion 
> for every possible email user in the US.

Current low end costs for "enterprise" storage are ~5,000/tb.  But, that
tends to decrease as time goes on.  Additionally, they could be doing
something spiffy like storing metadata and migrating messages that
haven't been touched for a long time to tape.  

I guess that they also wouldn't need all their storage right away.  You
could figure it could work like social security that way (not that I
expect it to work for me).  

> Now: do I think Google can generate that much in revenue from each 
> email user or from advertisers wanting to reach such users?   OH 
> yeah.  No problem.  Especially since I can guarantee that a lot of 
> GMail users will end up getting it through their affiliation with 
> some other group that can easily be marketed to.  College alumni 
> email accounts are one obvious source.  Unions and professional 
> societies are another.  Hell, *whole companies* could get out of the 
> email business by outsourcing to Google (maybe getting some deluxe 
> service).

Another killer would be selling this to corporations like they do with
their google appliances right now (SGI has one, even).  Wouldn't it be
nice if you could just google your e-mail, google e-mail list archives,
or internal newsgroups?

> And I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

I've eaten lunch there.  They seem like mostly benevolent dictators.
And they took over the old SGI campus, too.  Sad, I'll miss those
buildings.

-- 
--dlloyd

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