Mountain View, CA – Google announced today that soon customers of their Gmail service will have their storage size increased to “infinity plus one.” The announcement comes shortly after Yahoo’s announcement that their Yahoo mail customers would be given unlimited storage.
Greg Tomkins, an engineer at Google, is credited with coming up with the “infinity plus one” idea. “I was out in the yard when my kids ran up to me yelling at each other. My son said to my daughter, ‘I hate you to infinity.’ She replied, ‘I hate you to infinity plus one.’ And right then I knew I had the solution to competing with unlimited storage,” said Tomkins.
He continued saying that his son’s idea about putting “dragons and Pokémon” on the Gmail pages didn’t go over as well with management.
Tomkins also said that they would be using new RAID technologies which allow them to store copies of e-mail in parallel universes. This means that if their servers crash they will be able to recover your data from another universe where they haven’t.
“Once your Yahoo e-mail box is full, you’ll be able to transfer it to Gmail and add one more message,” said Tomkins. “Those Yahoos will have a hard time beating that.”
When contacted about the Google announcement, a Yahoo representative said, “We will be making an announcement shortly about our million-trillion-billion infinity storage,” and added, “Neener, neener, neener.”
Not to be left out of the storage bonanza, a Hotmail representative said that while they “can’t offer unlimited storage, they can delete all your e-mail at random intervals in conjunction with their Live OneCare service, to make sure you never run out of space.”
God – I love April Fool’s Day on the internet.