Bloglish

From：www.ghacks.net

It seems that the big three, that is Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, always have to compete against each other. When someone introduces a new feature the others are surely going to announce a similar feature that is just a tad better than the feature of the other company. We are witnessing the race for Email storage at the moment. Microsoft has a storage limit of 2 Gigabytes for their users while Google has currently a limit of 2,8 Gigabytes. Yahoo decided to accept the challenge and give the others something to choke on, they announced today that they will offer unlimited Email storage to all of its users in the near future.

As someone who has seen to many unlimited deals in the past I’m a little bit cautious about their plans. Let us take a little example here. Yahoo has currently around 250 million users that use their mail service. Worst case for Yahoo would be if nearly all of their users decided to use Yahoo Mail to send and store large files such as holiday videos, presentations and high res pictures. Let us assume 1 Gigabyte per month per user which would mean that Yahoo would need 250000 Terrabytes of storage space to keep up with the demands of their users. It is however pretty unrealistic that all users will upload 1 Gigabyte per month.

There are surely many dead accounts and some use it for normal mails only. It remains to be seen how many users will really use it for large attachments and how Yahoo will react if a user decided to draw the unlimited option and send a lot of large files in a short time. Google for instance bans users temporary who upload more than 1 gigabyte to Gmail in a short time. John Cramer, Yahoo Vice-President of mail, put it that way: “We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gigabyte, on average”

Two countries are excluded from the deal: China and Japan. The new service is supposed to go live this June.

( Chinese Version)

看起来网络三巨头GOOGLE、YAHOO和MICROSPFT总是彼此明争暗斗。其中任何一个推出了某种新功能，那么另外两个就马上推出类似的功能。现在，我们见证了“三巨头“在邮件储存空间上的精彩。微软的邮件空间达到了2G，而GOOGLE的邮件空间现在达到了2.6G。因此，YAHOO决定接受这种挑战，让两位竞争对手一把被噎死---今天YAHOO宣布在不久的未来他们将为所有用户提供无限的E-MAIL储存空间。

作为一个见识过无数“无限”功能的网络老鸟，我对YAHOO的计划有些许怀疑。且让我们看个简单的例子：YAHOO现在有2亿5千万邮件用户，在最糟糕的情况下，如果几乎所有它的用户都决定使用YAHOO的邮件去发送和储存大型文件，诸如假日录像、演示文稿或者高分辨率的图片。那么我们假设每个用户每个月用1GB的空间，那么YAHOO每月就得提供25万TB（TB，万亿比特）空间给它的用户！当然，每个用户每月上传1G内容的信息看起来并不现实。

YAHOO的用户中肯定有相当数量是“死帐户”，也有相当数量的用户只是用YAHOO MAIL去发普通邮件。我们且等着看究竟有多少YAHOO MAIL用户会真的发送巨型文件，而如果用户真的在短时间内发送大量巨型文件YAHOO又将如何应对？以GOOGLE为例，如果其用户在短时间内用 GMAIL发送超过1G的文件，那么GOOGLE会暂时冻结帐号。YAHOO MAIL的副总裁John Cramer对这种疑问回应说：“平均而言，我们的用户发送的文件远远低于1GB，对此我们感觉良好。”

该项新服务排除了两个国家：中国和日本。它可能在2007年6月份正式开始提供服务。