I don't think the invite only system was a marketing thing, but more of a technical one.
Google are very careful with new features; putting them in public beta for a long time, gathering feedback etc. They are progressively introducing POP access for Gmail, you may or may not have it yet. The invite system let's them control the signup rate and load. Imagine how much disk they would have to buy if they just opened the floodgates and expect 1,000,000 users within the first six months? That a max of 1,000,000GB. Thats 1 petabyte of required storage. :) (mmmm, petabyte...droool) Sure not everyone will be using 100% quota etc, but that is the ceiling. This lets them scale efficiently; they probably looked at the history of hotmail and said "hmmm, lets do this right". But then again, the marketing dorks might have had a say in the process. On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 09:40:28 +1000, Scott Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > GMAIL has to be the smartest marking campaign to date, the whole "its > invite only, sorry". It entices people to go "ooer, if its invite then i > want one, because i don't want to be left out" even though its a classic > pyramid scheme anyway (ie if you signup, and you get 5 other friends to > signup, then you will be cool). The only thing stopping it from being > illegal would be a reward of some kind for getting friends to signup. > > Gotta love google, smart folks there. --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aussie Macromedia Developers: http://lists.daemon.com.au/
