A lot has been said about google mega-network of commodity computers. The development of Gmail will position google very strongly for years to come and is a great example of what distributed network computing can achieve.

…the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else…
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming. (Source) (emphasis added)

This is clearly the source of their competitive advantage. Hotmail and Yahoo! watch out.

I wait with eager anticipation for what happens next.

Gmail will be talked about a lot over the next few weeks. I will be joining the goldrush to get my firstname.lastname@gmail.com or some suitable short, easily memorable name.

The privacy advocates out there have issued a well meant warning to all that we need to beware of the evil of giving our souls (or at least personal information) to the mighty storehouse that is google.

There is no such thing as a free lunch so we have to expect that there is some drawback to using a ‘free’ service. (Damn cliche. How did that get there?)