News of Google's new email service, Gmail, was less than 24 hours old when my old friend Tee Emm e-mailed me excitedly from Pakistan.

"Free email from google. 1 Gig of storage for every damn mortal. To be financed by Google Adwords triggered by the contents of the email."

Or as they might say here in America, Great Googly-moogly!

So what's the deal?

The deal is that Google is betting on its lower cost of doing business as it moves into more direct competition with Yahoo and Microsoft.

Remember back to Google's founding. They don't use big honking servers. They use cheap PCs, arranged a networked grid. It's parallel processing, the same principle as that used by SETI@Home, just done locally. It's why Cray Research crashed, why Von Neumann is now a name from history, why supercomputing rockets ahead instead of crawls.

When you or I need more computing power, in other words, we go buy a new machine. When Google wants new power or storage, they can use our old machines. If its drives can be scrubbed and it can use Linux, they're golden.

This is a design decision that many of us forget, as we rush to cover things like software algorithms and corporate machinations.

There are still fields where you can win if your cost of doing business is significantly lower than the other guys'. And in this case it is.

1 Gig of storage for every damn mortal. You don't have to know Urdu to be impressed by that.