Last year in April Fool’s Day, Google announced the rumor of Gmail, and due to the coincident date of announcement, most people thought of it as crazy idea and didn’t take it seriously. As already we can see, Gmail has changed and reshaped the free* email services; and forced Yahoo! and MSN to make a lot of changes. So how did Google manage to give everybody 1GB of webmail spaces without server panic?
My theory is: BETA.
It is true, that GMail is still under developing and testing, features and security issues are being added and solved. But I think another key issue for keeping GMail in beta is to keep allows the maximum amount of people to use GMail that the server can possibly provide.
When one person obtained a GMail account, that’s already 1GB of space assigned to him (whether he use it up or not, that’s a difference issue), and when Google gives him six invitations, that is another 6GB given undirectly to him. To make sure that Google’s server doesn’t crash from the initial registration and gives away thousands of TBs of spaces, making GMail a beta product and requires invitations was a good strategy for it. Instead of millions of people demanding Google to add more harddrives, this strategy allows Google to upgrade their servers, and then allow more people to register.
By making Gmail beta also discourages people from registering more than one account, not that it’s impossible, but it makes it harder for them to do so.
Now a day, Gmail invitations are everywhere and it seems like everybody is got one, Gmail has almost successfully allowed everybody who wants a Gmail to have a Gmail account, and the quality of the service didn’t go down, and the reliability of the servers didn’t panic either. I’d say it’s a job well done.
* Free in terms of $$$, but the over filled screen with computer ads sure is annoying. Actual cost of brain cells wasted to filter them out is priceless.
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