5 ms·
Bullshit. The conclusions the author draws, that Gates was "anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved" sounds like typica
by josephcooney 15y ago
Bullshit. The conclusions the author draws, that Gates was "anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved" sounds like typical hand-wavy details-don't-matter business-person think. Microsoft is notorious for generating tons of internal e-mail. People go away on holidays and come back to 10K unread emails. More likely Bill knows how much e-mail he receives and roughly how much it grows per week/month. This guy tells him that he's burned through 1GB of e-mail in few months and that just doesn't add up to Bill. Either this reporter receives an order-of-magnitude more e-mails than Bill does or people have 1MB pictures in their signature blocks or something. So Bill starts drilling down and asking questions. Remember Bill is a fairly 'technical' guy (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html)
'He began firing questions. "How many messages are there?" he demanded. "Seriously, I'm trying to understand whether it's the number of messages or the size of messages." '
I don't interpret this to be gates questioning the necessity for more than 1GB of e-mail, just trying to get to the bottom of how this guy managed to use that much in a few months.
- jamesbkel 15y agoAgreed. I definitely have more than 1GB of email, but asking one would need/use that amount of storage is a perfectly legit question.
- rbanffy 15y agoBecause, according to the old paradigm, part of using email systems was the chore of deleting old messages. Much like it's perfectly natural to a lot of people to find a company's website, download a setup program and run it instead of running a package manager.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nirvdrum 15y agoMaybe it's just me, but I still have to delete messages. Otherwise a bunch of crap I no longer care about gets returned in GMail's search, completely defeating the purpose of having a search-driven interface.
- FaceKicker 15y agoI find I'm unable to determine whether a message is crap I'll never care about again or not. Often I can't think of a reason I'd possibly ever use a message again, and lo and behold there's some strange reason I want to refer back to it 2 years later (e.g., figuring out my start date for an old job on a new application ... weird little cases like that).
- nirvdrum 15y agoI guess just about everything Google will classify as "bulk" I'll never need again. The Groupon deal that expired yesterday isn't something I'm going to need to access 2 years from now. Maybe those monit alerts I will, but in all likelihood not. Things like that. But they usually end up having just enough terms to throw off GMail's already terrible search making it hard to find content I really care about.
- mapgrep 15y agoI found using the is:read modifier in my searches is a great way of weeding out the crap, since I usually don't even bother to open that stuff. YMMV!
- rbanffy 15y ago> Otherwise a bunch of crap I no longer care about gets returned in GMail's search It may be a language issue or a query-building issue, but I feel no difficulty searching through my gmail mailboxes. I often adopt an iterative approach where I build up my query by watching what gets returned.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- dmethvin 15y agoOne good reason that it tickled Gates' bullshit detector is that up until Outlook 2002, the Outlook .PST file format was limited to 2GB; Microsoft had a recovery tool (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088) to fix the problem. I knew someone who banged up against that limit as early as 2000, but only after saving every email they received (including many with huge attachments) for more than four years.
- mdda 15y agoBut that's one thing that was distinctive about GMail : it encourages you to keep (archive) everything - and searches it very quickly. Compare this to Outlook : Searching is painfully slow, and the instinctive way to use it is to delete emails rather than keep them.
- jodrellblank 15y agoCompare this to Outlook : Searching is painfully slow Outlook 2003 maybe, but that was eight years ago. Microsoft bought lookout and Outlook indexed search is pretty much instant.
- Retric 15y agoThat's BS, I use outlook 2010 and IMO Searching is still painfully slow. I suspect I probably have less than 50MB of excluding attachments so it should be nearly instant even if it's a non indexed full text search.
- ghurlman 15y agoThere's definitely something wrong with your setup. Windows XP will require an extra download, for example.
- weaksauce 15y agoI just started to use gmail's imap support to access my email accounts with thunderbird. It's quite impressive what the thunderbird team have done with it since I got disheartened with it a few years ago. One thing I was pleasantly surprised with was how good the search feature was.
- rwmj 15y agoI bet Gates is also thinking about how much it was costing Google to store all that. Multiplying the numbers by the numbers of Hotmail users (2 GB * a few hundred million). That was the clever thing about Gmail's original invite system. Google could offer an amount of storage that Microsoft could never match, and the invite system ensured they could control the initial volume of users.