I always enjoy the opportunity to walk out on a limb and look really smart or to look like a fool, so I am going to take a guess at what is going on with Gmail accounts today.
It appears that some Gmail users today opened their account to see that their storage limit now appears to be 1,000,000 MBs (no that is not a Terabyte, a TB is 1,048,576 MBs) rather than the standard 1,000 MBs (no that is not a GB either, a GB is 1,024 MB... but I digress). I have a couple of theories around what is going on here.
Theory 1: Rumor has it that Google employees are allocated 1,000,000 MBs of space in their Gmail accounts. I am guessing that during a refresh of the user database, there was a mix up that accidentally flagged some users and Google employees and therefore they now appear to have the increased storage size. If this is the case I would expect Gmail to fix the mistake in a short time frame before people start filling up over the standard 1,000 MBs.
Theory 2: With the recent announcement by Yahoo! that they would raise their free accounts to 100 MB in storage Google could be flexing their muscle and showing exactly how scalable their infrastructure is while trying to get back their storage advantage before launching Gmail.
Theory 3: The Gmail team is testing the market to see what the reaction would be to 1,000,000 MB of email storage. If the response is that they are crazy, they can just say it was a minor bug, but if it is positive they can roll it out to the rest of the users without really worrying about having to add much storage, because seriously, it would take a long time to just upload that much data :)
I am voting for theory 3... Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments below or through email.
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