I have been surprised to see how quickly the free storage capacity on Gmail has been increased during the last few month of 2007. Wikipedia has some numbers for us:
On 12 October 2007, Google ramped up the storage counter to 5.37 MB per hour. Approximately a week later, the counter went back down to 1.12 MB per hour. This adds up to about 806 MB per month or over 9.8 GB per year. From 4 January 2008, the counter went back down to about 3.35 MB per day.While some people will end up using a significant portion of this space, most people, even power users, won't. So what is the point of increasing the storage capacity to those level? Maybe Google is just doing it because they can. I will be optimistic here and predict that Google is drastically ramping up their storage infrastructure to get ready for a new file storage service, often referred to as Google Drive or GDrive, that they are planning to launch later this year.
