Yahoo! promises! unlimited! email! storage! (and the world)

All you can eat at Thursday's IT Blogwatch buffet: in which Yahoo Mail removes its storage limits. Not to mention the world in only seven pictures...

Gregg Keizer and Eric Auchard play tag-team:

Yahoo Inc. will give users of its Web e-mail service an unlimited amount of storage space starting in May, the company said yesterday ... With the change, Yahoo will remove users' current 1GB limit. However, one analyst said the announcement was more sizzle than steak. With the change, Yahoo will be the first major Web mail service to explicitly offer an unlimited storage locker for messages. Google Inc.'s Gmail, which currently advertises 2.5GB of storage space, comes closest; Google says it will increase a user's storage capacity as that user loads up his account.
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One analyst, however, said there was really nothing of substance to the Yahoo "unlimited storage" move. "I don't know how important this is, actually," said David Ferris, the principal at Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based market research firm that specializes in messaging issues. "It sounds more impressive than it is." ... In other words, it was easy for Yahoo to commit to unlimited, since relatively few of its quarter-billion users will take the portal up on the offer ... Although business users may have gigabyte-and-up message storage needs, few consumers -- the people who make up the vast majority of free Web e-mail service users -- do.

Yahoo email VP John Kremer channels Buzz Lightyear:

When Yahoo! Mail launched 10 years ago, users got a whopping 4MB of storage for their entire mailbox. Today, you would fill that up with a single picture from your weekend.
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We’re psyched to be breaking new ground in the digital storage frontier by giving our users the freedom to never worry about deleting old messages again. And, like any responsible webmail service, we have anti-abuse limits in place to protect our users. BTW: As much as we’d like to just flip a switch and “unlimit” everyone on the same day, we’ll be rolling this out over a few months to facilitate a smooth transition — we know there’s virtually nothing more precious than your inbox.

Paul Stamatiou muses:

The attachment size limit of 10MB (20MB for Y! Mail Plus subscribers) per email hasn’t changed. So much for emailing large movies of your St. Patrick’s Day drinking antics to your friends… but then again that’s what YouTube is for ... Yahoo!, like others in the data storage industry, are well aware that only a small percentage of their users will use more than a few gigabytes. I vaguely recall a conversation with Caterina Fake where she mentioned that a infinitesimal group of Flickr users ever came close to utilizing their monthly upload limit, which was 2GB for pro users back in the day.

Mike Masnick remembers:

It's been almost exactly three years since Google first announced Gmail. The massive one gig of storage surprised the world so much that many assumed it was simply a practical joke by Google. However, Google insisted that they recognized how storage was getting cheaper and cheaper, and that it simply didn't make sense to limit how much mail you could keep ... Of course, while 1 gig seemed nearly infinite three years ago, it wasn't long before some people noticed it still wasn't enough. So Google started a running tally increasing their amount of storage every second to try to stay ahead of the curve. The folks over at Yahoo finally realized this was silly.
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Storage is cheap. Getting and keeping users are expensive. If you can use unlimited storage to get and keep users, it's probably worth it.

John Murrell talks graphs to us:

If I had to pick my favorite chart (like if Barbara Walters asked me or something), I’d have to say the kind that shows a long, descending line as a product’s price drops to zero (unless, of course, it happens to be a product I make). That’s what has happened to online e-mail storage over the years, and the trend line reached its inevitable conclusion today.
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Though all the blog chatter has been about Yahoo this morning — given that, with 250 million global customers, it’s the biggest of the Big 3 — AOL reps are running around reminding people that it has offered unlimited e-mail storage since 2005 and is now free.
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Now it’s a question of whether its competitors will feel compelled to offer infinity+1 GB to keep pace.

But Michael Arrington is scornful:

Is Yahoo Mail now the best webmail product? Not in my opinion, even with this announcement. It has the best and fastest user interface (although many users prefer Gmail), but does not support IMAP, and POP access and forwarding are premium features (Gmail offers POP access and forwarding for free). Gmail also allows tagging of emails, a feature I find extremely useful for organizing archived mail. Still, the Yahoo Mail team seems up for a fight, and their massive lead over Gmail isn’t going anywhere soon. My bet is that more features are coming soon.

Buffer overflow:

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• Michael R. Farnum: SSL offloading / accelerating / load-balancing is scary
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• Martin MC Brown: Web abuzz with CS3, but upgrades are unfriendly
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• Douglas Schweitzer: Looks aren't everything, but they help!
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Previously in IT Blogwatch

• Vista sales "doubled"? Perhaps not (and sexy slideshow)
• Pros and cons of online anonymity (and DIY laptop battery)
• Bill Gates speaks... in 1989 (and movie title mashups)
• YouTube quakes in its boots (or not)
• Apple TV ships with mixed reactions (and wildcard)
• Older posts

And finally...  The World in only 7 Pictures

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.