Not very long ago, storage on web-based email measured in the megabytes, and not very many of them, either. When Gmail arrived with its 1GB inbox, invites to the service became a hot commodity.

Google's decision to take advantage of what has become an inexpensive commodity, storage, spurred interest and gave the company another place to drop its signature contextual advertising. As of market close on October 11, Google's $622 share price gave it a market cap of over $194 billion.

We can't tie that directly to Gmail, of course, but Gmail likely didn't get in the way of that rise, either. Google plans to give a little back to the Gmail users in the form of more storage:

In April 2005, we started increasing Gmail storage as part of our "Infinity+1" storage plan. At that time, we realized we'd never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able. That said, a few of you are using Gmail so much that you're running out of space, so to make good on our promise, today we're announcing we are speeding up our counter and giving out more free storage.

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