The Power of Abundance

Posted on February 22nd, 2007 in Design, Usability by Puneet Sarda
Remember 2001/2002 when we used to have 6 MB capacity for our email accounts from Yahoo or maybe 10 mb from Hotmail. We used to screen every email, every forward and every attachment to decide if it was worthy of being in the inbox or could be trashed right away. Many of us used to save all the attachments to our local drive and get rid of the emails. Even though it was slow to download them on a dial up it was worth it if the forwards were good. And it was necessary anyways or else your account would full up. The capacity progress bar would go from green to orange to red and you knew it was time to clean up.
Yahoo Mail in 2001
And then came Google with Gmail with 1 GB of email space!! Something no one had ever imagined. We were amazed wondering if they can really do that, do they have the capacity to store so much email. Gmail was by invitation only so soon people were selling invites on Ebay, friends were requesting each other to invite them etc… And if you were one of those who want to never delete an email…there was archiving for you. Within a year Yahoo announced that it will raise the capacity to 1 GB and paid accounts will have 2 GB. Hotmail, Inbox.com etc joined in later.

Gmail Capacity in use today for one of my accounts
Suddenly we all got used to so much of email capacity. We could now store thousands and thousands of emails without worrying about … well anything. They are going to be there as long as we want. Sheer abundance of space had changed our very perspective to email… we began to use it much more, realized that it appeared much more convenient that it did before and we could stick to one or two accounts instead of having to manage 5-7 accounts just because of capacity issues.

Abundance showed what its really capable of in a way it never has. Email capacity got transformed from a luxury, a sacred and scarce resource to something that we no longer concerned ourselves with. We now had the time and energy to concentrate on the actual details of the email, on our businesses and personal lives. Imagine the number of man hours saved each year by stopping people from having to worry about email capacity. With reference to my post on “The Feels Good Factor”, email had now turned into something that felt good to use, something that did its job and bothered you no more with unnecessary concerns.

Technology should be enabling and that is what email became. Enabling us to focus on the problem at hand rather than the mode of communication used to talk about that problem. The providers did end up installing huge servers to address the new capacity needs but to make the business going fine did a few things to stop the users from going crazy with the large capacity they had. One was to restrict the attachment size to 10 MB thus stopping us from emailing large movie or music files. If you wanted to share video or music you had YouTube and Google Video among the other numerous options. The other was the ability to archive emails. That saved quite some space on the servers and yet the users always had access to all their emails.

What other technologies you believe brought abundance to your life and helped you stop worrying about them? And in what domains do you feel abundance needs to step in and relieve you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.