A discussion about the software industry and their coders

This post continues from my previous post Mad Media All the World's Innovations are Belong to Google.

Can Google give gree disk space, mail storage, and whatever else to the "Entire Planet"? Ask yourself another question-- "Can Google host a free party for the entire planet?" and the answer will be obvious.

Why is GMail still in Beta

Why is it that GMail is still in Beta? One reason is that it is operationally expensive to let the product out of Beta and provide that much of free hard disk space to everyone. Just a few viruses can become a security nightmare to GMail.

So I keep wondering if Google Disk (GDisk) and GMail and all such "free" services for the entire planet were made "open to all users" -- whether Google (GOOG) could operationally handle the traffic and also bear the expenses for the same?

It is all too easy to say that you can give disk space (dubbed GDisk) to the entire world to store data and hence personalize the serach results. However, in reality running a data center to offer such a service to the entire world can work to be extremely expensive and probably unfeasible right away.

I wonder what folks at Google or some people in media actually mean when they either make such claims or discuss them in crazy detail without asking fundamental questions about financial viability of such ideas (along with the viability on other important dimensions). Do read the reader comments to the Computer world blog. Most people consider the idea crazy.

Here is quote from Greg Linden's In a world with Infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU Power that discusses Google's Feb 06, Analyst Day claims to build Infinite Storage:

slide 19 (in the notes) talks about how their work is inspired by the idea of "a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power." They say that "the experience should really be instantaneous". They say that they should be able to "house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)" which leads to a world where "the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache".