Gmail

Google's new email is generous with hard disk space and generous with search capacity. Why are they being generous? Well, there are probably several reasons. The main one is that they get the power of information. They know that if you give people space and ease of access they will communicate and share. If you put controls on them they will automatically be more reserved. Look at hotmail.com or yahoo.com which put limits on their mail. They did it to control costs but they drove away the interaction of the people.

Generosity pays. The more people have rooom to interact with each other on their terms the more likely they are to be creative and generous.

Comments

Justin Long said…
Another reason that gmail gives such space is that they are creating a virtual advertising space, and the more space they give, the more "pages" they have to advertise on. By allowing you to store all your emails, each email becomes a "page" on which advertising can be placed. The beauty of this is that advertising is always current. Its not as if you go back to an old email and the ads are dated. So for example I have over 10,000 emails on google (yes, seriously). That's 10,000 pages worth of advertising. But if I view a message about AIDS from, say, 5 years ago, the ads will be current and might reveal something I didn't know about. And those old messages are indeed brought up because they become part of ongoing conversation threads.
7:29 PM
Justin Long said…
Another way to look at it (hit the button too soon) is that by being generous with their space, they provide additional "connection" possibilities. Their generosity provides more opportunities for transactions.
7:29 PM
Jon and Mindy Hirst said…
I think this is a key idea. Being generous pays off. If we are generous with what we have, there are many more opportunities to connect people, sell product, develop relationships, etc. Again it goes back to a simple reality - generosity is the opposite of limited good. If we live a generous lifestyle, we live realizing that there are always more opportunities, resources, etc.
8:40 PM
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