Bill Gates Didn't Understand Gmail

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K2N hater

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I'm with Gates here. I'd much rather download all the stuff to my PC daily and keep backups regularly. Local search works a lot better and large remote files are vulnerable to connection drops, which occur when you need them the most... I guess Levy never had issues with 3G internet.
 

sykozis

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[citation][nom]SmileyTPB1[/nom]Keep in mind that at the time Hotmail had like a 10mb cap and you had to pay MS money to get more space. Of course Bill didn't get it. He didn't understand a business model that gave someone anything for free.Of course Bill has never been an innovator, he's always been more of the steal other peoples ideas type of guy.[/citation]
Internet Explorer has always been free....as has Hotmail....and PowerPoint Viewer....Outlook Express... Internet Explorer was distributed free of charge, when Netscape was trying to get $20+ for their browser.
 

Flameout

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[citation][nom]bison88[/nom]Of course it seems silly now in retrospect but you have to understand Bill Gates mind at least remotely. The main for all he's worth is very narrow minded. When he sees something he attacks it, but he never sees the "bigger" picture per se. Which is why Microsoft often became dominant then dormant in many areas, not really decaying, just not expanding from its original objective. So when Bill talks about email he's thinking post office size letters with a few packages, not packages with a few letters. It's a shame to watch Microsofts creativity fall so hard especially now that he's left as CEO, but give it time and Google will find themselves in a similar situation no matter how many Masters and PhD employees they higher. That 15-20 year mark seems to be the time frame tech companies lose their originality and start stabilizing into a big modern corporation, if they can last that long.[/citation]
google is creative. microsoft is not. apples and oranges.
 

bv90andy

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[citation][nom]Fuwunucakagu[/nom]640k Bill, eh?[/citation]
I was thinking exactly about that.
However the amount of space for e-mails is pure Marketing today. Isn't Yahoo! unlimited?
 

lucuis

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I do see his point, but some people do use a lot of email space judging my these comments. I don't myself. I've been using the same gmail account since it was still invite only, and currently i'm using a whopping 85mb!
 

ProDigit10

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They offer it probably because they use compression on archived mails.
Compression on text mails is greater than 10x, so essentially your 1GB of text only consumes 100MB of diskspace on the google servers.

Little more for pictures, little less for pure text.
 

joytech22

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[citation][nom]ProDigit10[/nom]so essentially your 1GB of text only consumes 100MB of diskspace on the google servers.Little more for pictures, little less for pure text.[/citation]

If they used 7zip's algorithm they could get 13GB of data down to 300KB..
 

pita

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I have to agree that we don't really need that much of a email space (at least majority of us) it was for the most part a marketing strategy. Gate may be pretty good as far as being an tech visionary goes. He sure isn't a marketing guy.
 

alidan

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[citation][nom]TheRabidDeer[/nom]If you know much about that topic, he had increased the memory to 10 times what was previously available. A similar example of what could happen again, is take the current high point of say... 32GB of memory. Then introduce something that allowed you to have 320GB of memory. Can you even imagine how much software you could run with 320GB of memory? Can you imagine really needing that much? Give the guy some credit, it lasted well for 6 years in a rapidly evolving industry.[/citation]

there is no way any home consumer will ever need 320gb, of ram, not even in the BEST of constance. i actualy doubt that we will even even get cheap consumer grade 4k cameras (as in sub 2000$) and thats the only logical way that 320gb would ever be used, is through dumping all the video into ram and and streaming new video to ram as older gets encoded.

other than that, we will never have programs, especialy on the consumer level that bloat to that size, you have any idea how many lines of code that would take or how big and uncompressed an image would have to be to come close to that?

it would be nice for vm, servers, and other computers, but they already have tbs of ram, not on one system, but they already use more.

now if i have to take a guess, within 10 years we will hit a massive ram brickwall, not we cant make ram bigger, but on the, who the hell really needs that much?

currently if i had 8-12gb i would almost never need to restart or shutdown programs. in 5 years i will probably have a 32gb system, and never need more, possibly faster at some point, but not more.
 

SteelCity1981

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[citation][nom]TheRabidDeer[/nom]If you know much about that topic, he had increased the memory to 10 times what was previously available. A similar example of what could happen again, is take the current high point of say... 32GB of memory. Then introduce something that allowed you to have 320GB of memory. Can you even imagine how much software you could run with 320GB of memory? Can you imagine really needing that much? Give the guy some credit, it lasted well for 6 years in a rapidly evolving industry.[/citation]


The key word in his mistake was 'ever' not for a while, or not for some time to come, but 'ever'. Gates out of all people should have known that the way technology was evolving, factor in moores law and that 640k of memory was going to get surpassed 6 years after that statement, let alone ever.
 

therabiddeer

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[citation][nom]SteelCity1981[/nom]The key word in his mistake was 'ever' not for a while, or not for some time to come, but 'ever'. Gates out of all people should have known that the way technology was evolving, factor in moores law and that 640k of memory was going to get surpassed 6 years after that statement, let alone ever.[/citation]
It is called selling your product. He later said he expected it to be enough for at least 10 years and was surprised that they needed more only 6 years later.

Also, see post above yours in regards to the same thing. It is ridiculously hard to envision needing 320GB of memory on a consumer level, but, as we all know, it is possible.
 
"A dumpster is a lot bigger than a trashcan, but all it holds is a lot more garbage."
-me, some time in 1984.
This email box bloat is yet another symptom of two problems: information overload, and sheer laziness. SPAM is part of the former, just particularly unwelcome. I have multiple email accounts, including work. I suspect that, added up, all the inboxes and folders beneath them (but not counting separate archives), would be less than a gig.
 

mindbreaker

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Dude! I can't find anything in my Hotmail there are currently 11,972 emails. And that is after years of deleting garbage and having to make three different accounts. They need some decent filters. I have given up on it for everyday use. I just use it for password recovery and for all the stupid sites that demand an email. Looking up anything from the past is just impossible. My Gmail is the real deal.
I have to protect myself from crap even then "You are currently using 1823 MB (24 %) of your 7573 MB." But I have been using it since it was by invitation only. Hopefully, they are right, and I will never have to delete my old gmails.
 

pale paladin

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Those who are soo important and soo busy that they have soo many emails and cannot manage their mailbox size should in theory be rich enough to hire a damn assistant to do it for them. Believe it or not unless it is a legal matter NONE of you have anything to say worth keeping. I'm gonna crap myself if I see another OST over 2GB. Make the time to archive and delete your junk.
 
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Killerclick: you should try looking into the Gmail concept of "Labels" - that is an upgrade to the concept of folders. With labels you can have the same email in different folders at the same time - without having to doublicate it. No more "ehm, that email contained information that could go into different folders - which one did I put it into"
 

elusion11

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[citation][nom]pale paladin[/nom]Those who are soo important and soo busy that they have soo many emails and cannot manage their mailbox size should in theory be rich enough to hire a damn assistant to do it for them. Believe it or not unless it is a legal matter NONE of you have anything to say worth keeping. I'm gonna crap myself if I see another OST over 2GB. Make the time to archive and delete your junk.[/citation]

EXACTLY what I wanted to say, I have been using hotmail for over 15 years, been with the same email address, I'm an architect who do design work and 3d, so you can expect large attachments from time to time, but my inbox has just a little over 2000 emails @ 300mb, why? because I archive and manage them, I delete shiit i don't need, set up filters to automatically delete messages with keywords in them, and block-sender on all the junk mail i receive. nowadays, about 80% of mail that makes into my inbox are ones that are relevant to me.

also if i'm sending images i downsize them before i send it, its ridiculous to send pictures of your 'friday night out with your buddies' in 4872x3592 resolution that are like 10mb each to your friends, It just frustrates me to no end to recieve pictures from people, and when you open it, their nose and crooked teeth fills up half the screen, and they are like 'hey check out my trip to Florida last weekend'
i downsize them to something like 1024x768 compressed at 200kb that do their job just fine.

So I'm with Gates on this one.
 

SteelCity1981

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[citation][nom]TheRabidDeer[/nom]It is called selling your product. He later said he expected it to be enough for at least 10 years and was surprised that they needed more only 6 years later.Also, see post above yours in regards to the same thing. It is ridiculously hard to envision needing 320GB of memory on a consumer level, but, as we all know, it is possible.[/citation]


So now we go to what was at the time in your first response to it's called selling your product lol. Face it Gates made a mistake, he even admitted that later on which he himself has joked about saying in many of his live events.
 
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