Written by: Beck

I had a professor in b-school who raised a question about the current wealth of free email services to be found (This would have been early 2000). He argued that free email services would eventually go away and be replaced with pay-services once people became more dependent on email.

I occasionally remembered his argument as I watched my hotmail account have one service/feature after another stripped away & shuffled over to the premium services accounts. The basic account only offered 1mb for storage and attachment size. The premium accounts, if I recall correctly, offered 50mb of storage and (not sure on this one) 5mb max attachment size.

Then along came Google's GMail offering 1gb of storage and 10mb attachments. It was starting to look like my professor's dire predictions were turning out to be unfounded. If history has taught us anything, it's that any prediction made about the internet will look unbelievably foolish in two years or less.

I couldn't help but chuckle when I found an email in my hotmail inbox today informing me that I was getting a free upgrade to 250mb of storage and up to 10mb for attachments. I've always suspected that the marginal cost of storage & bandwidth is ridiculously low to large scale operations like Hotmail host MSN--and this just goes to show it.

Of course, none of this would have happened but for that little miracle known as the free market. Gotta love competition.