Matthew Engel

Everyone know’s Google is still growing. Backed by their powerful webmail client, Gmail, Google is adding universities to their ever growing list of clients, according to Time magazine. Both Microsoft and Google are offering webmail services to colleges all over the US for free! This can save a school millions of dollars a year in server storage space, security management, and network maintenance. It has allowed major universities to streamline IT staffing or much better yet, refocus their efforts on actually helping students learn and teachers communicate via technology. Traditional university email accounts are capped at 100mb with very little space for attachments. Many users treat gmail as a free data storage dump emailing themselves hudreds of pictures, documents or pdf’s as a back up so they can be downloaded on the fly. The amazing search capabilities and add-on features for gmail such as color coded labels, multiple inboxes, viedo chat, and collaborative document editing place the service in high demand for tech savy students. When Gmail shed its beta test icon just this July after 2 years of ‘trial’ use, major universities such as Notre Dame, Brown, Cornell and Georgetown have all begun implementing their service. Personally, I am confused by Google’s business plan here. How can this be a profitable enterprise when they are giving services away for free to major clients? Their is no advertising, so that revenue source is gone. The real value I see here, is that 1) Google could start charging users for this service at any time – though they probably never will, and more importantly 2) Google has access too all your data. As much as we would like to think our information is completely secure, we all know that any information written in an email can be used as evidence and is not considered private. Email providers make no promises about the security of our emails, and the vast sums of information now on Goggle’s network is priceless. This itself is an interesting topic and worth exploring more in the future.