Already blown away by Yahoo Mail's announcement of free unlimited storage, now Google's Gmail is about to get lapped by Microsoft's Hotmail as they ready a push to give each user 5 gigabytes of storage for free. Gmail, which once blew everyone out of the water by offering 1 gigabyte of storage when other services (like Hotmail) were offering 20 megabyte inboxes, is now the one being made to look ridiculous.

It wouldn't be so bad had Google not just announced that they would begin offering the option to sell user's extra space at a pretty penny. How does that $20 a year to up your Gmail storage to 6 gigs look now when Microsoft is giving you 5 gigs for free? Especially when you consider that the 6 gigs isn't just going to be dedicated to Gmail, but instead will be spread throughout all of your Google Apps - something which could render the extra space near moot if you say, store a lot of picture on Picasa Web Albums.

I just don't understand Google's strategy here. I thought the idea of making all these great web apps free was just to get people's eyeballs on your ad networks? Storage, as everyone knows, is the cheap part of the equation and it's only going to get cheaper. Online storage should simply be no problem, especially for a company like Google with massive server farms out there in the ether. If you want to limit costs than limit bandwidth - as Flickr used to do (they had unlimited storage but put a cap on uploads a month - now both are unlimited), and as the Internet Video companies are quickly figuring out with the sad state of American broadband.

But Google is flat-out limiting storage (they don't even allow you to purchase as much as you want to match Yahoo's FREE offer - you're capped at 250 gigs), and it just doesn't make a lot of sense for a company that seems to want to hold all of your data. You have to believe that Google has more storage space then either Yahoo or Microsoft - yet they have now the strictest limits of the three. Even more baffling (as I've stated many times before) is that Yahoo Mail, which again now offers free unlimited storage, has millions more users than Gmail - so what exactly is Google doing with all of that storage they don't have to worry about having available just in case everyone in the world decides to start mass-mailing each other pictures of cats?

That's the question. Is Google planning something big? Are they bulking up on storage for a massive undertaking such as Gdrive? Or is Google just being cheap? Did I mention AOL now has unlimited free email as well. Yeah, I expect a remedy Google - soon.