Gmail Can’t Get Bigger?
Scoble throws out a potentially hugely important piece of information: the fact that Gmail can’t handle a large increase in users:
Also, we already know that Gmail isn’t scalable. Ask Chris Uhlik. He runs the Gmail team. I did at O’Reilly’s Foocamp last year. Ask him why they limit the number of invites you can send out. Chris told me it wasn’t done for marketing reasons, but because they couldn’t keep the quality of service up without limiting the number of users on the system.
Let’s be honest, one of the biggest selling points of Gmail is its speed. If Gmail will drop to Hotmail like speeds when it gets several million more users, it just won’t be that good. And the fact is, it is possible that at tens of millions of users it is actually slower than Hotmail, due to the highly advanced coding behind Gmail.
Google hasn’t been making friends with its performance on Blogger. While we all understand the performance hits blogs put on a server (none more so than bloggers who have their own servers), Google seems to almost be idling by while Blogger spirals further and further into the toilet. There were wide reports last week of massive blackouts all accross the Blogger system, but very little surprise. Everyone just nods their head when Blogger goes down; its expected.
I would never use an email system that performed like that.
Any idea approx how many users are there currently using gmail ?
Comment by Kashif Khan | April 10, 2005
In its heyday, Orkut was also terribly unreliable.
Maybe this is just a lack of priority. I don’t see how this stuff is fundamentally more complicated than search, which has always been fast enough.
Comment by Alper | April 10, 2005
Scoble might be jumping the gun here.
Maybe they’ve resolved some of these issues which is why we all got 50 invites recently. I also would think that gmail would stay a slightly important part of Google’s over all product line because it works with their advertisements. I don’t know how much revenue they’re seeing off it, but if it’s doing as good as adwords, etc, then there’s plenty of reason for them to keep allowing new users to sign up and increasing resources as needed to allow it.
Comment by matt | April 10, 2005
Blogger, Orkut, and Gmail really outside of Search though. They’re the exception to Google’s general refusal to directly host content.
It might be a reason why they get less priority, and less focus.
Comment by Brock | April 10, 2005
orkut never was really a part of google. it’s hosted by Google but was originally run by Orkut himself.
Comment by Scott | April 10, 2005
“the fact that Gmail can’t handle a large increase in users”
Fact? Try ‘blind supposition’. The ‘F’ in ‘FUD’ doesn’t stand for ‘fact’.
Comment by Kevin Fox | April 11, 2005
The fact that “Gmail can’t handle a large increase in users” does NOT mean that Gmail is not scaleable. It simply means that with the current hardware, they cannot support too many users.
In Software Engineering terms, a product is NOT scalable if even adding more resources to it will not help. This happens when the product is not properly designed. I don’t believe this is the case with Gmail.
Comment by Noam | April 11, 2005
Thinking more about this, it really doesn’t hold up. Stuff like this is why I quit reading Scoble.
I have 50 unused invitations. Everyone I know already has Gmail. Gmailomatic has another 800k waiting to be used.
And if they were having scaling problems, why on earth would they double the storage for everyone?
Comment by Alper | April 11, 2005
[…] rt Scoble’s assertion that Gmail is not scalable and cannot handle large amounts of users, as discussed yesterday. First off, Google’s Kevin Fox tak […]
Pingback by » Some Major Disagreement With Limited Gmail Theory InsideGoogle - part of the Blog News Channel | April 11, 2005
The search problem is WORM. There is one node doing the writing, and the results are read by replicated servers. Gmail, blogger, and Orkut all allow anyone to write into the system. Making a muti-write system scalable is an order of magnitute more difficult than single-write system.
Comment by Jeremy Hilliker | April 12, 2005
Hi,
Could you please send me a gmail invite.
Thanks
Peace
Comment by Peace | June 24, 2005