Yahoo, Hotmail, and Ask Jeeves vs GMAIL

Major e-mail providers are increasing their mailbox sizes by almost a factor of 100 to compete with Google. Still with their offers of ~100Mb for free users they all fall short to match Gmail's 1GB offer.

In addition to getting into e-mail business, Google is forcing its competitors to spent more money on hardware and get less from the potential premium account subsribers.

Apparently Google is triyng to pull its competitors into the battlespace where it has total dominance in all large scale hardware experience, user appeal and interface design, and cheaper costs per GB.

This looks just like the Arm Race during the Cold War. United States were able to drag Soviet Union into the financial battlespace, where they were superior. This eventually lead to fall of the USSR as we knew it under the unberable military spengings.

But there is one thing that makes it even more funny: Google has limited number of Gmail users (=total required disk space) while its competitors have to provide bigger storage for the existing huge user base.

If Google keeps GMail user population limited for another year, while Hotmail and Yahoo servers will get filled to a 100% with the spam, then... Oh well, Microsoft, has way too mach money to follow the path of the Soviet Union...