DrunkenBlog

Gmail overselling

Been following the whole gmail thing for the last few days... what a stroke of genius to release that on April 1st. They not only whole get huge buzz going for it, but they get a whole second round of press that are simply "Turns out gmail isn't april fools. Google is launching...". Brilliant, somebody should be getting a bonus.

If you haven't followed, gmail is google's new email service hitting public beta in just a short while. The three big things that set it apart are:

• 1 gigabyte of storage
• (Hopefully!)Innovative interface built on google's search tech
• Possibly some new anti-spam tech

There's a whole wealth of information out there regarding why much of this is a very cool & very interesting shot across the market... much of it revolving around their competition generally offering between 2 to 6 megabytes of storage. Since there's a whole wealth of information out there about that aspect, no point in rehashing except to say "Woa.".

But, there has been something sticking in my craw, and that's lots of people throwing out numbers to show how it is either fiscally possible for google to do this (apparently google is claiming this will cost them $2 per user on average) or fiscally impossible. Stop it. If I read one more thing about this I could very well scream, and that's not pretty as I don't have a very manly scream... it's a tad girlie. Basically, all these numbers & figures people are working through are utter crap.

What google is employing is a concept called "overselling", meaning you are selling more than you actually have to sell, with the expectation that the vast majority of users will not use the service to full capacity. If a company oversells, and their customers do use the full capacity of what they've been sold, by & large that company has screwed the pooch.

For that reason, overselling is dangerous. It can (and has) get a lot of companies into trouble (um, ever notice how some of those very cheap hosting companies that offer incredible bandwidth and space are slow as hell? they've oversold their bandwidth and miscalculated on what they actually needed to be available, or just don't care). This type of thing happens all the time. But many a company is able to sit down and figure out that while they're overselling, what resources they do need on hand in order to meet the service requirements.

I.E., if a hosting company is selling plans with 10gigs of space, and weren't overselling, they'd need to allot 10gigs of space for every hosting account. If you have a 100gigabyte hard drive for use by the accounts, that would mean they could only take on 10 clients. But, after some time goes by, they notice that while a few users do use gobs of storage, the vast majority aren't simply because they don't have that much data, and probably never will come close.

For those 10 users, they could very well be only using 30gigs of space. Since they have another 70 gigs they aren't using, they could have three times the original base by overselling, with 10gigs left over for padding to allow for unusual circumstances. Assuming they have done some testing and gathered some decent metrics, they've probably run the numbers and found it doable.

This is a pretty rampant practice in lots of markets, and isn't exactly unethical... it would only be such if you actually tried to use the full capacity and were then rebuffed. I wouldn't be surprised if google is going to be using much of the public beta to fine tune this metric... I think it's fairly obvious that the vast majority of people out there don't have a gigabyte of email.

So, please, no more "How can they do this? The biggest drives are x gigabytes!". It's not possible to run that kind of calc, too many variables are missing. Hell, they could be running a compression routine on all non-binary mail for an average 4x space savings on files that aren't things like .jpg's... without knowing, it not really an equation you can run.

So stop!

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    April 03, 2004, at 08:11 AM