
Bill Gates Flabbergasted By Gmail - jkuria
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/05/31/bill-gates-flabbergasted-by-gmail.aspx
======
josephcooney
Bullshit. The conclusions the author draws, that Gates was "anchored in the
old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved" sounds like
typical hand-wavy details-don't-matter business-person think. Microsoft is
notorious for generating tons of internal e-mail. People go away on holidays
and come back to 10K unread emails. More likely Bill knows how much e-mail he
receives and roughly how much it grows per week/month. This guy tells him that
he's burned through 1GB of e-mail in few months and that just doesn't add up
to Bill. Either this reporter receives an order-of-magnitude more e-mails than
Bill does or people have 1MB pictures in their signature blocks or something.
So Bill starts drilling down and asking questions. Remember Bill is a fairly
'technical' guy (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html>)

'He began firing questions. "How many messages are there?" he demanded.
"Seriously, I'm trying to understand whether it's the number of messages or
the size of messages." '

I don't interpret this to be gates questioning the necessity for more than 1GB
of e-mail, just trying to get to the bottom of how this guy managed to use
that much in a few months.

~~~
dmethvin
One good reason that it tickled Gates' bullshit detector is that up until
Outlook 2002, the Outlook .PST file format was limited to 2GB; Microsoft had a
recovery tool (<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088>) to fix the problem. I
knew someone who banged up against that limit as early as 2000, but only after
saving every email they received (including many with huge attachments) for
more than four years.

~~~
mdda
But that's one thing that was distinctive about GMail : it encourages you to
keep (archive) everything - and searches it very quickly. Compare this to
Outlook : Searching is painfully slow, and the instinctive way to use it is to
delete emails rather than keep them.

~~~
jodrellblank
_Compare this to Outlook : Searching is painfully slow_

Outlook 2003 maybe, but that was eight years ago. Microsoft bought lookout and
Outlook indexed search is pretty much instant.

~~~
Retric
That's BS, I use outlook 2010 and IMO Searching is still painfully slow. I
suspect I probably have less than 50MB of excluding attachments so it should
be nearly instant even if it's a non indexed full text search.

~~~
ghurlman
There's definitely something wrong with your setup. Windows XP will require an
extra download, for example.

------
peng
There's a certain irony in this thread sharing the front page with “We ran out
of disk space” (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747152>)

------
Deestan
> "anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be
> conserved"

The author seems to think that Google's innovation was to simply ignore the
storage problem and then it went away.

What they _did_ was _work immensely hard_ at the storage problem, until their
innovations in data compression and retrieval made it possible to store larger
amounts of data. <http://highscalability.com/google-architecture>

------
CrLf
"anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be
conserved"

Yeah, such an old paradigm... Just try managing backups for an ever increasing
mail store...

Yes, today storage is cheap (even middle-tier storage arrays where the cost
per-GB is about 20x of consumer-level disks can be considered cheap), but
keeping large volumes of data safe from disaster is _not_ "cheap". Just ask
Google how much time it took them to restore those Gmail mailboxes from tape
after they got lost in production a few months back. And that's google we're
talking about...

------
loboman
Bill Gates' question made some sense. If mails are 3k each, and you have 1 GB
of space, how many mails do you need to receive per day to get out of space in
6 months?

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+gigabyte+%2F+3kilo...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+gigabyte+%2F+3kilobyte%29+%2F+6+months)

the answer is 1826 mails per day. I assume what happened here is that they
didn't have good stats of the mail sizes in the conversation and Bill tried to
estimate something like this and as a result, he thought it was ridiculous.

~~~
cracki
3k is a bit small...

consider, those are newspaper people. they send HTML emails, PDFs, scans,
photos, all that stuff. wouldn't surprise me if they collected a few megs a
day. busy people.

~~~
sesqu
Version control over e-mail would hit that 7MB/day limit easily, when dealing
with image formats. Makes sense.

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mike-cardwell
Just some figures that might interest.

Current storage offered in a gmail account: 7,602MB

Current maximum size of an email for gmail: 35MB

So you could technically fill a gmail account with 217 emails.

However, looking at my mail backups, I've received approximately 17,000 emails
so far this year. The average size of an email was 6.6KB. Altogether, they're
using up just over 100MB of disk space.

My live mail has only 15 of those 17,000 emails remaining in it, using up
300KB of disk.

~~~
sabon
It seems like maximum size for an email is 25 MB.

"With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 25 megabytes (MB) in
size."

<http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8770>

~~~
mike-cardwell
I got the 35MB by connecting to their MX and then looking at the value
returned by the SIZE ESMTP extension:

    
    
      mike@alfa:~$ telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25
      Trying 209.85.143.27...
      Connected to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
      Escape character is '^]'.
      220 mx.google.com ESMTP z4si16632304weq.140
      EHLO mail.cardwellit.com
      250-mx.google.com at your service, [178.79.145.246]
      250-SIZE 35882577
      250-8BITMIME
      250-STARTTLS
      250 ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
    

Their MX states that it accepts messages up to 35882577 bytes in size, which
is just under 35MB.

~~~
ianterrell
That's a great bit of technical expectation management.

"We'll accept up to 25MB!" And then when you send something 26 or 27MB because
you don't notice that it's so close to the limit, the system forgives you.

~~~
gvb
More likely it is an accommodation of base64[1] (MIME) encoding of binary
files, which results in a 30% expansion (3 bytes get encoded to 4): 25MB *
(4/3) = 33MB. People who read that GMail is limited to 25MB will expect their
25MB photo to be accepted. This requires the absolute size limit to be set to
33MB (probably bumped up to 35MB to accommodate the HTML body and other
spurious stuff like the 25 off-topic replies).

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64>

------
jc123
Gates was right in "What've you got in there? Movies? PowerPoint
presentations?" A variant of the 80/20 rule probably applies to email: 80% of
the size of your inbox is caused by the 20% largest emails.

~~~
Jabbles
True, although it would be hard not to have such a rule:

 _where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants,
there must be a number k between 50 and 100 such that "k% is taken by (100 −
k)% of the participants_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle>

~~~
esrauch
Yeah, that is pretty obvious. No one would bother saying that 55% of the space
is taken by 45% of the email though. It is mentioned because of high
difference between the two values.

~~~
kragen
I think that _would_ be worth pointing out, because it's such a huge deviation
from the quasi-Zipfian behavior you'd expect.

------
libria
For what computers cost in 1980 compared to their utility, I'm not sure why an
average household would get one.

~~~
pnathan
An astute observation.

I believe it took spreadsheets for 'personal' computers to really start taking
off in the smaller business world; it wasn't until - IIRC - Windows 95 that
computers took off in households. I remember that you were something special
prior to '95 or so if you _owned_ a computer.

------
robryan
I think the number would seem like a plus to most even though they will never
get anywhere near needing it. Just knowing that your never going to hit a
space barrier while archiving all your emails is a big thing.

------
sung1
Yeah well what I'm interested in is: what are we believing in right now that
will sound just as ridiculous five years from now on?

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ern
If this was 2004, how did the author have 2GB of storage on Gmail and use
"more than half", when it launched with 1 GB and was only upgraded to 2GB in
2005? ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail> )

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nohat
1GB over a few months? In text? That's ~500000 pages of text. I doubt that the
reporters actually received that much email. There's probably something else
draining space that they didn't realize (hence Gate's surprise).

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ImprovedSilence
I'm on a mobile phone right now, and I have to say, that was the most poorly
laid out and convolouted site I've seen on a phone......

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georgieporgie
_Only a few months after starting this, both of us had consumed more than half
of Gmail's 2-gigabyte free storage space._

Okay, I'm extremely suspicious of anyone who claims to process one gigabyte of
email per month. Barring large attachments, that is a _tremendous_ amount of
sheer data. If you're getting that much email, you probably need culling tools
more than you need space.

Regarding the two gigabyte limit being shocking, it _was_ at the time. The
only reason Google could pull it off is because 1) very, very few users would
get anywhere near that and 2) they were already scaling data at a ridiculous
rate. A traditionally desktop-oriented software company like Microsoft would
not be able to offer anything similar without tremendous investment of
hardware and development.

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latch
The saddest thing about this, for me, is that I work for a company where
everyone (including myself) gets over their mailbox limit in a couple days...7
years.../cry

------
staunch
Adding "2MB email ought to be enough for anybody" to the list of things Bill
Gates _might_ have said.

~~~
mdda
But somewhere in the design of Outlook was an implicit 2Gb limit : The max
size of a PST file. Maybe it was an OS limit, but still the decision to store
all email in a single binary blob wasn't sufficiently forward-thinking.

~~~
gaius
I suspect that means a .PST is mmap()'d (or Windows equivalent), 32-bit
Windows gives each process a 2G address space by default.

~~~
kragen
If that were the problem, the limit would be substantially less than 2G
because of the address space needed for the DLLs, the stack, other allocated
memory, and so on; and, of course, the space consumed by address space
fragmentation.

