Or just long term investment and planning. And in those 17 years we got so much more storage and better service that it redefined free email. When gmail launche

Or just long term investment and planning. And in those 17 years we got so much more storage and better service that it redefined free email. When gmail launched with 1GB of free storage the competitors (Yahoo, Hotmail) where providing 10-15Mbytes, seriously, it's not even funny. Today Google gives you a lot more free storage than there were giving when Gmail was launched but it also gives you even more storage if you pay for it. Seems win-win to me and not anti-consumer. Now if they started to shrink free email storage and that affected large numbers of existing users (10% or more) maybe I'd agree this was bait&switch but otherwise this is simply giving more options.