Bill Gates Was Puzzled By Gmail's Size, Book Reports

Many people love the seemingly infinite amount of space Gmail provides.

Bill Gates, at least initially, didn't see the need.

In his new book In The Plex, Steven Levy details Bill Gates' reaction to Gmail six months after the service first launched.

Levy recalls telling Gates how even just a few months after he started using email, Levy had already "consumed more than half of Gmail's 2-gigabyte free storage space."

Gates "looked stunned, as if this offended him" when he heard this, Levy writes of their conversation.

"How could you need more than a gig?" the Microsoft co-founder asked, according to Levy. "What've you got in there? Movies? Power-Point presentations?"

Gates proceeded to pepper Levy with questions. "How many messages are there?" he asked, Levy recalls. "Seriously, I'm trying to understand whether it's the number of messages or the size of messages." Levy writes, "After doing the math in his head, he came to the conclusion that Google was doing something wrong."

Gates, at that point, had already given Gmail a whirl.

"Oh sure, I play with everything," he apparently said after being asked if he had experimented with Google's email service. "I play with A-Mail, B-Mail, C-Mail, I play with all of them."

The episode draws what Levy believes to be a clear distinction between Google and Microsoft. Gates got his beginning writing code for systems where storage space was always an issue. Google's mentality however, was born in an age of ever-increasing space where more is often better, especially in terms of email storage.

Gmail still offers the some of the largest storage space available for free, but competitors like Yahoo! have added gigabytes of space to their email storage in order to compete, in some cases even making email data storage unlimited.

The father of Microsoft has occasionally criticized Google in the past, notably in the search market. Gates also scrutinized Google's role in China, according to a January 2010 New York Times post, shortly after it was discovered that Chinese officials had been spying on human-rights activists' Gmail accounts.

"They've done nothing and gotten a lot of credit for it," Gates told the Times.

Comments

[JohnUSA]

04:03 PM on 04/16/2011

No surprise. He once thought that 640kB was enough.

[ramblingjohnny]

01:40 AM on 04/16/2011

Well how could he understand Gmail size after all it parked on servers running that free hobbyist OS that nobody would seriously use! lolll

[OC4Obama4Pres]

02:14 PM on 04/20/2011

Linux Rulz!

[JTS313]

08:04 AM on 04/15/2011

Seems Gates forgot Moore's Law and the power of that postulate to change the world.

[KiTTGT]

06:32 AM on 04/15/2011

Do you need all of the 1000 horses in the Bugatti Veyron? i don't think so. There is a good chance that most of the people that will use them will NEVER take advantage of 80% of its pottential, but you would like to drive it right? But in this case the "veyron" is not only fast but has a LARGE trunk. A thing that might come in handy. but doesn't make the whole "thing" sluggish.

[openhand]

03:26 AM on 04/15/2011

all about perception,
in a world of noise and people shouting and yelling at you, selling, google gives a place where you can hear yourself.
sure they are selling, they are just doing it in an extremely disarming way.

[IHATEFOXNOISE2]

09:57 PM on 04/14/2011

"They've done nothing and gotten a lot of credit for it," Gates told the Times.

Sort of like saying..."We made KRAP operating systems and gotten a lot of money for them."

[LubrlConCarne]

12:29 AM on 04/15/2011

'KRAP?" imagine hundreds of different manufacturers producing hundreds of different motherboards, hard drives, RAM, CPUs and combine them all leading to millions of possible PC permutations oh make them compatible with at least the last three years and make them all work with thousands of software applications - and yes it does work for 99% of all PCs in globe - and your call it KRAP?

[omg wtf lol bbq]

03:49 PM on 04/15/2011

You must not realize that Windows is nothing more than spaghetti code. Even Windows 7 is spaghetti code, when it comes down to it. The only thing worth noting, however, is that Microsoft finally did remove Windows 3.1 codebase when they released Windows XP 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 64-bit. Still, the fact remains that it's nothing more than a patchwork quilt.

[bernusdellus]

05:53 PM on 04/14/2011

Hmmm... Nobody ever seems to mention Apple's MobileMe in these discussions of email. OK, it isn't free [$99US per annum], but it includes a 20Gb online storage capacity, the ability to email files as large as 1Gb, the picture gallery, public ftp-style folders and web-hosting.

I save money by using it, enjoy all the features and look forward to the constant stream of cool new things that Apple pop up and put into the package.

Fanboy? Hell yeah.

[LubrlConCarne]

12:29 AM on 04/15/2011

doesn't count - it costs money plenty of other cheaper choices in the pc world

[bernusdellus]

04:17 AM on 04/15/2011

I dunno. Here in godzone it costs about $30 per month for web hosting alone. My MobileMe account is roughly $9 per month. That means I'm ahead by $21 p.m. and I get email as well.

Putting aside my "fan-boy" thing, that still seems like a good deal.

[MaxPowerXP]

10:08 PM on 04/15/2011

Picasa Web offers 25GB of online photo gallery for $5 a year and Windows SkyDrive is 25GB of cloud space for $0/year. I can't imagine why anyone would pay $99 a year for the same thing.

[Rope-A-Dope]

04:19 PM on 04/14/2011

Gates and Microsoft don't like companies that support open access to source code. The Microsoft way has always been to design things to work (for a while) as long as you were willing to allow Microsoft make decisions about what people 'really' want to be doing. Such a flaw.

Moreover, it's not like Microsoft has ever been credited with originality. They stole their Windows functionality from Apple and were ridiculously late to the game with the entire Internet craze. They do a lot well....but then who wouldn't with a gazillion dollars (yahoo excepted)

[jsarets]

05:22 PM on 04/14/2011

Microsoft doesn't necessarily have a problem with open source, except perhaps for the "copyleft" licenses (e.g. GPL, LGPL, MPL, CDDL) because of the reciprocity terms.

They use lots of open source code in their products. For example, much of the Windows TCP/IP stack came from BSD. Remember that MS tried to create its own network protocol called Netbeui even though the Internet was already dominated by TCP/IP and they failed miserably.

Microsoft also likes to contribute code to open source projects in order to  give them support for Microsoft's products and pet standards. For example, Microsoft has actually contributed a set of virtual device drivers to enable paravirtualization of the Linux kernel on Microsoft's Hyper-V, and they cooperated well with the Linux kernel project to get those drivers accepted into the kernel.

They've also contributed a bunch of code for apache and php to support various Microsoft message passing protocols and other "middleware" stuff they want people to use.

Basically, Microsoft has more of a problem with open standards than they do with open source per se. They want people to be locked into their proprietary standards even when they're using open source software. The lock-in is what Microsoft strives for. That's their bread and butter.

[Phong Le]

08:05 AM on 04/15/2011

Google support open access to source code? I would love to see the source code to PageRank algorithm, Adsense, Adwords, Honeycomb, GMail, Google Docs, GTalk, Google Maps, Google Reader, Google Voice, Youtube, .......

[Gronkie]

04:18 PM on 04/14/2011

If it wasn't for a monster amount of storage, the guy that is currently suing Zuckerburg wouldn't have been able to pull out 7 year old emails to prove his case. Never delete anything but spam.

[Th3 5p3ctr3]

06:57 PM on 04/14/2011

Depends entirely on what you're using your email for. Some of us prefer to leave as little laying around on someone else's servers as is humanly possible.

To each their own though.

[Gronkie]

10:06 PM on 04/14/2011

I am aware of the security concerns of my emails residing somewhere else. The "cloud" thing concerns me as well. I recognize that someday there will be a scandal in which someone is compromised in some way because whoever was minding the servers took a peek or something. Actually, something happened recently when a very small percentage of Gmail users lost their entire history.

I don't worry about it too much because my business doesn't contain any major secrets. It would be an inconvenience to lose them, but not the end of the world.

[MaxPowerXP]

10:12 PM on 04/15/2011

I am so glad I saved my FWD>FWD>RE:FWD>FWD>RE:THE 1996 DARWIN AWARDS emails for the last 15 years

[BigLeftbowski]

04:11 PM on 04/14/2011

That's OK Bill -we still don't understand the Zune.

[MaxPowerXP]

10:13 PM on 04/15/2011

It's a personal media player that uses less cumbersome navigation than the iPod and had features in 2006 that iPod/iTunes is still struggling to catch up with.

Understand now?

[AnnoyedCanuck]

04:09 PM on 04/14/2011

Gates, the godfather of oversized bloatware operating systems and Office applications, is complaining about too much storage space for email?

Am I missing something, or is there a huge contradiction here?

[xsanetimes]

04:11 PM on 04/14/2011

What your missing is that its usually the manufacturers who sell you the computers who put in the bloatware into the operating system. If you don't like the Office application, don't use it

[Rope-A-Dope]

04:23 PM on 04/14/2011

disagree with you. the reason MS stuff is so bloated is simply because the original versions of things don't support changes and integration well. they are poorly designed to begin with and when an upgrade comes they need to keep the older versions of things alive too so they can support their user base. it probably comes down to a matter of price. apple software is cheap enough that users don't mind staying current with the apps and operating systems. MS is still so expensive so people resist upgrades for years on core MS OS and peripheral/third-party software.

that computer manufacturers make increasingly large hard drives and memory added years to the lifespan of MS.

[Libercation]

03:58 PM on 04/14/2011

Zuckerburg in 30 years.

[reddy52]

03:57 PM on 04/14/2011

"They've done nothing and gotten a lot of credit for it," Gates told the Times.

Look who's talking.

[xstevejx]

03:46 PM on 04/14/2011

Maybe if he hadn't dropped out of school, he might not be perplexed by so many things. ;-)

[MarsAmbassador]

03:42 PM on 04/14/2011

10 years ago we used to delete emails. Now we don't. I have over 12,000 sent emails and over 11,000 in my Inbox (2500 of which I haven't even opened). Not to mention about 1500 in my draft folder. THAT is where the space comes in now. Why delete anything if I have the space?

[xsanetimes]

03:45 PM on 04/14/2011

To find emails faster? Not take 30 minutes to look through 12,000 emails

[MarsAmbassador]

03:48 PM on 04/14/2011

It's called a SEARCH function. Takes like 5 seconds.

[CapriRS302]

04:10 PM on 04/14/2011

I can't tell you the number of times that I have had to go back and access an email from two, three, even five years ago. Maybe to get some information I had forgot, or get an attachment I had lost. It really comes in handy.

[LubrlConCarne]

12:31 AM on 04/15/2011

the perspective might change if one has a business and might be subject to a lawsuit sometime down the road