Antipode

In a decision initially assumed to be an April Fool’s joke, Google has announced
GMail, a free email service that offers one gigabyte, or 1000MB, of email storage
per user. However, now that the New York Times and and Associated Press are
running stories about it, complete with quotes from Google staff, amusement
is giving way to shock. GMail’s two main competitors, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail,
offer 2MB and 4MB of storage respectively.

"It is completely unfeasible for Google to offer 1000MB of storage space,"
said one source for Microsoft’s Hotmail unit. When told that GMail would indeed
offer 500 times the storage of Hotmail, he countered that, "obviously there
would be loads of banner ads." When it was pointed out that Google has
no intention of doing banner ads, but simply text ads, we were asked, "How
do I sign up?"

While Yahoo Mail prepares to switch their marketing pitch from "Twice
the storage space of our biggest competitor" to "1/250th of the storage
space of our biggest competitor" the question on everybody’s mind is, "how
the heck can Google do that?" We asked a panel of analysts
to give their opinions. "Google is actually powered by God," argued
on analyst. While Google has neither admitted this nor denied that claim, that
would explain their ability to turn a huge profit while providing awesome services
for completely free. Another analyst insisted, "They actually use 1GB of
your own computer’s space without you knowing it."

Other analysts’ theories include lying about how much space you’re using, that
1GB is a typo for 1MB, and that there is no such thing as email. One of our
analysts in particular was insistent that GMail will fail. "GMail rhymes
with email," warned the analyst. "New users will get confused, and
not be able to tell the difference. Chaos will ensue." While none of these
have been substantiated, analysts are generally always correct.

One analyst mentioned, "In unrelated news, Google has won a multi-billion
contract with the Department of Homeland Security for an ‘Information Storage
and Retreival System’ for national security and awareness purposes." While
we’re not sure what the analyst was getting at there, we’re sure the US Government
wouldn’t be interested at all in tracking millions of gigabytes (also known
as petabytes) of communication.

Our own research indicates that Google may actually be able to provide this
service, as long as they do the following things: track you intesively and sell
the information, charge govrnments an arm and a leg to do the same, prohibit
emails to and from Hotmail once the service is popular, and pray nobody uses
their entire gigabyte of space.

The author of this article really likes Google, but is less of a fan of the
FBI being alerted if he uses the word "bomb" in an email.