Constraints can be good. The article reminded me of the tales of 'oldschool' hackers saying that lacking resources of early computers forced them to write good

Constraints can be good. The article reminded me of the tales of 'oldschool' hackers saying that lacking resources of early computers forced them to write good and compact code. The scarcity of a resource obviously leads to this resource being valued higher than if it would be available in abundance. What I find noteworthy, however, are his examples: the resources described are constrained artificially, yet are still valued higher than if not constrained (and competing services not constraining the resource (Flickr or normal Blogs in his example) couldn't destroy this mechanism). When, however, does this mechanism take place? When email accounts where strongly constrained in storage space, GMail with its then 1Gig storage was seen as liberation (the opposite effect).