The GMail topic just is not cooling down, besides for all the forum debate that is still taking place at:
The debate is still hot amongst some of the most popular blogs. Recently, Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Books, posted in his personal blog an entry named The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus. Where he gives his opinion on why the GMail controversy is really not such a big deal and people should really give Google a break about it.
Jeremy Zawodny, the Yahoo! guy, posted an entry in his blog in response to Tim's post. Jeremy named his blog entry, Blinded by Gmail's Gigabyte?, where he discusses his objections to Tim's view. Tim then later posted a comment at Jeremy Zawodny's blog stating.
Jeremy, maybe you didn't read Rich Skrenta's blog, which captures the reasons for my enthusiasm. Gmail is an example of what you might call a "tipping point innovation." That is, it's been possible for some time, and there are a number of players (your employer, Yahoo! included) who could have pulled it off. But someone finally did it, and it happened to be Google. Giving 100 to 250 times the free storage provided by other services and making it work with Google-level search capabilities means that webmail can be more than a secondary convenience, or the email of choice for home users. More significantly to me (because I'm interested in understanding long term trends and their impact on what becomes possible as time and technology advance), it makes a bold statement about where both storage and the network are going...
For the full comment scroll down to the comments section about 70% down the page, where it reads On or around April 17, 2004 08:47 AM Tim O'Reilly wrote this:.
The debate goes on...So you think Google expected this? You know what they say, no PR is bad PR.