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

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Dave Lloyd wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Jonathan King wrote:
> 
> > 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.

Doubt they're doing the later, since they want you to search your 
email quickly (and, yes, give them an opportunity to show you 
another sidebar ad when you wearch for "BWM 323i" in your email).
 
> 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).

Well, I was asssuming each free gig was only 5% used, so yeah.  
Social Security is (in theory) a pay-as-you-go system with the
problem that fewer people might be paying in when I'm getting read
to go. :-)  Of course, full-service gmail/web_site/what have you if
they offer it would probably be a lot less over the rest of my life
than what I paid last year in FICA...
 
> > 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?

Ah; now *that's* good thinking.  Smaller outfits probably wouldn't 
need to bother doing any in-house stuff, though.
 
> > 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.

They don't have to be that benevolent to win this game; just 
sufficiently less evil and greedy than the competition.  Seriously, 
I've *bought stuff* off the sponsored links on the right side bar of 
google. The only non-Google buys I've made from webads were one 
thinkgeek purchase and one item from crucial that I was going to buy 
anyway.  Google's $/megs_of_ads_transferred ratio is way better 
than everybodye else's.

And, hey, they could have knocked down the SGI campus and put up a 
theme park instead, right?

jking



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