Is Google fooling us or itself ?

About a couple of years ago google made a big news when it entered the e-mail market with its service called gmail. The news was considerably big because it was offering its user something that no one would have ever dared to even think of. Google offered 1GB of storage space to its users. Bigs guys like Hotmail and Yahoo were offering less than 10MB of space. There were even speculations that hotmail might die soon.

Since a user could sign-up only by invitation, everyone wanted an invitation and even today you can sign-up only if you have an invitation. It was a huge success and therefore on its first anniversary google doubled the storage space. People were even more happy now. It ofcourse, hit Yahoo and Hotmail really bad.

Google obviously knew that people wanted more storage space. It also knew that no one will ever use that much amount of space and that is how probably came the concpet of 1GB. Again, on its first anniversary it wanted to make news and since it really did not matter if the number was 1 or 2, google made it 2GB and people went mad again. Everything was logically amazing till picasa web came into existence.

Today, with more photos and videos on web than ever, any amount of space given to the user will always be less. While Google gave 1GB of space for e-mail, it is giving 250MB for photos. Isn’t it contadicting ? Even a small kid knows that photos will require more space. With Google making use of the single-account concept (or whatever you call it), wasn’t it logical to integrate the storage space also ? User should have been given 2GB which he/she can use for both e-mails and photos.

Google probably later did realize its mistake of announcing 1GB (and later 2GB) of space but it would have hit them badly if they would have decreased the space later. It would have been a big embarrassment for the search giant to do so. It is something very unusual of Google. Google is known to give pleasant surprises to its users unlike this one.

Even Yahoo did something similar but then I think the 1GB concept was just blindly copied from Google in order keep up with the user base. If Google could afford to give us 1GB of space for e-mail why can’t it give for photos ?

So did Google fooled us by announcing more storage space for e-mail and now when we actually need more space it is not giving us ? Or does Google have plans of incresing this number in the future?

If Google did not fool us then it has definitely made a fool of itself by announcing picasa web. Or is it the way Yahoo copied Gmail, Google has copied flickr ?