You say it, but you don't support it. What about being in NYC is necessary for the business operations of a global newspaper? You know, the MBA type stuff? The logistical type stuff? Pretty much everything but the gathering of news that occurs in NYC?
I don't know. Maybe nothing. But if moving to Akron, Ohio would solve all their money problems, don't you think one of those MBAs would have proposed it? Obviously the cost outweighs the benefit.
Moving to the new building when they did does seem like a cluster-fuck, but it's too late to change that decision now. Apparently they are taking steps to minimize the financial impact of that decision.
And if worse came to worst and the New York Times came to Mayor Bloomberg and said, "We can't afford to operate in New York anymore," do you honestly think he'd just shake their hand, pat them on the back, and let them leave?
I think you're fixating on a non-issue. The problems at the Times run far deeper than the real estate it might own.
Still, there's such a thing as letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I don't advocate giving anybody a free pass, but why are a few missteps reason enough to give everybody an automatic fail, no matter how high a standard they set?
Hmm. A lot of it certainly does seem to be available for free. And yet when I go to economist.com without logging in, mouse over to the picture of this week's cover, and click the link that says "Full Content," I get a page telling me that this page is available only to subscribers. Furthermore, they advertise "full access" to the Economist Online as one of their main subscriber benefits. (shrugs)
BTW, I find it paradoxical that you say you never would have dreamed of subscribing if you couldn't get all the content for free. What's the logic there?
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times, said in a statement: ''We respect and commend the Pulitzer board for its decision on this complex and sensitive issue. All of us at The Times are fully aware of the many defects in Walter Duranty's journalism, as we have and will continue to acknowledge. We regret his lapses, and we join the Pulitzer board in extending sympathy to those who suffered as a result of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine.''
Since then, the coverage from the Times has been much more sensitive to the issue. (Random article.)
Well... a laptop, a phone, plane tickets, hotel rooms, meals, gas, car repair, and Internet access, I reckon. Tom Friedman's column seems to mostly be about flying around, talking to various CEOs and other luminaries, then writing about how Tom Friedman has fascinating conversations with CEOs and other luminaries.
Long before the Internet, there was only one phone company in a given locality.
Actually, long before the Internet, there was only one phone company. Perhaps you're not old enough to remember leasing your phone from Ma Bell (yes, your physical phone, like a cable box).
Today, phone companies have become mini-monopolies again, but they don't get to operate with total impunity. They're not allowed to charge you to call 911, for example. Why? It's a public good.
As for ISPs bundling access to media, my model is something like how TV stations used to work. Remember all those "public service announcements" that would come on, reminding kids not to talk to strangers or telling you not to drink and drive? Stations were required to air these messages by the government. It was one way they fulfilled their social contract. We gave them exclusive, monopoly access to the TV airwaves -- you and I aren't allowed to just start our own TV stations -- and in return, they have to do just a little bit for the public good. Or had to. It doesn't seem to be that way anymore so much. Similarly, cable companies used to be required to carry CSPAN and offer a public access channel, because they were deemed to be good for society.
Is access to respectable, thorough journalism not a public good? If journalism just disappears and all we have left are amateur blogs, what impact would that have on the health of our society? I think it would be dramatic.
We're giving ISPs monopolies -- or at the very least, de facto monopolies -- just like the phone companies. Is it too much to ask that they give something back, in the form of subsidizing journalism?
I don't even see why they should complain about it. ISPs are free to compete on raw pipe, but why should they not be able to add additional value? I'm in favor of Net Neutrality. But let's suppose YouTube went to a closed, subscription model. If one ISP offered raw pipe and another one offered pipe plus "free YouTube" (meaning ISP-subsidized YouTube), would that be so terrible? This model might be a way to talk ISPs into accepting Net Neutrality, because it would allow them new ways to compete.
I've only recently been turned on to this and I agree, the audio edition of The Economist is fantastic. I honestly don't know how they do it every week.
OK, now you're running around in circles. I ask what newspaper has more eyeballs than the New York Times. You say only people with "excess money" read it. I tell you it's free right now. You say nobody reads it because nobody wants to read it, because they don't believe it's "high quality." Here's where I remind you that the New York Times has won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other news-gathering organization, and it gets more traffic than any other online newspaper (but the eyeballs still aren't paying the bills). What's your next argument? Nobody reads it because all its articles are in Chinese?
Yeah, but did your friend ever work for the New York Times? Some publications -- and by extension, some journalists -- have a stronger reputation than others. Saying the Times does nothing but pass off op-eds as news without citing any examples is kinda like saying, "Oh, I hear Obama is as bad as Hitler" without even knowing what the United States is.
I'm sure doing business in NYC ain't cheap - do they really need an entire building in midtown Manhattan?
The New York Times management has made mistakes, but they aren't complete dummies. They don't actually have an entire building in midtown Manhattan anymore. But as far as being a "global newspaper of record," being based in what some have called the "capital city of the world" isn't a bad idea.
When was the last time you read an article that included a direct quote? Or asked someone a pertinent question? Or hell, even showed any knowledge of the subject material?
What?
Every news story on the front page of the New York Times includes direct quotes. They are reported by real reporters, working in the actual locations where news is taking place -- so I'd say their knowledge of the subject matter is considerable.
Maybe the more pertinent question is, just what is it you have been reading that you've been calling "news"? You're pointing the finger at journalism, but maybe the real problem is closer to home than you think.
I've worked for the San Francisco Chronicle in the past but most of my work has appeared in tech trade publications, most particularly InfoWorld, where I spent several years as a senior editor. It's not like I make any secret about it.
or perhaps consistently and copiously write articles that everyone wants to read because they are high quality... which, oddly enough, brings back advertisers when there are lots of eyeballs
Unfortunately, that has not been proven.
I mean, seriously... what newspaper has more eyeballs than the freakin' New York Times?
The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases
What can I say? Citation needed.
I find some of the anti-journalism bias I see on this site to be a little scary. It seems like the kind of anti-intellectualism that allows our society to play right into the hands of propagandists and demagogues, and it's frankly not what I'd expect of the/. audience.
The three posts I'm seeing so far all assume this will be the death knell of the Times. But the alternative if nothing changes is for the Times to piss all its money away until it closes its doors in bankruptcy. There has to be a happy medium. Somebody has to try to find it, and that's what the New York Times is doing now.
mrphoton says he'll read www.bbc.co.uk instead. That's all well and good, but the BBC is supported by British taxes, while the New York Times is a private newspaper. There's a strong tradition of separation of media and government in the U.S. and it isn't likely to ever change. But some have proposed operating newspapers as nonprofit organizations, which may be a close compromise. In that arrangement, newspapers would essentially be relying on government to leave them alone, by not charging them taxes. Where their operating expenses would come from, however, remains an open question.
To me, charging subscription fees for access to content makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite publications, The Economist, has always had a pay-wall around most of its content. And while advertising rates for magazines have been dropping across the board, subscriptions to The Economist have actually been climbing in the last few years. Why? Cynics say it's because people want to look intellectual by carrying around a copy of The Economist that they actually never read. People who subscribe to The Economist say they do so because of the marked differences between it and other, more traditional newspapers: The Economist prints zero celebrity gossip, and it never fiddles around with stories about car crashes or green gardening. It has a global focus. Its stories are well-researched, thorough, and not dumbed-down. In other words, if I'm going to pay to have someone deliver a stack of printed pages to my mailbox every week, The Economist will bring me far less wasted paper.
It's also mentioning that The Economist does not print any bylines for its articles. So to Tom Friedman's complaints, cry me a river. Do I subscribe to the New York Times because I want an informative, timely, in-depth news resource, or do I subscribe because I like to read so-called rock star columnists? Personally, I don't even read Tom Friedman's column, because his books have been massive disappointments. Talk about overrated. So should a guy like Tom Friedman be allowed to hold an entire news gathering organization hostage to his own ego? Tell you what, Tom: If you're such a public treasure, start a blog. Surely the people will flock to it. Or could it be that the only reason anybody read your column at all was because of the New York Times, and not the other way around?
The success of a subscription program for the Times' Web site will probably all depend on the price they charge for it. Certainly there will have to be opportunities to get stuff for free, as Salon.com has done. Even The Economist offers a 14-day free trial. Even then, the idea that anyone will pay even a fraction of the cost of a subscription to the New York Times just to read one or two articles a week -- or one or two articles a month -- is nuts. Somebody needs to do the hard research to figure out a realistic rate of payment for the content that people actually read. A monthly or yearly subscription fee, when nothing is showing up in the mailbox and you never remember to go and look at the site, isn't going to work.
At the same time, I worry about the concept of newspapers as a public good. Everyone, no matter their income level, is entitled to know what's going on in their government and the world at large. If newspapers close themselves off only to paying subscribers, you force the economically disadvantaged to venues such as TV news. On the one hand, local TV news has been turned over almost entirely to fluff. On the other, cable outlets like Fox News look increasingly like propaganda weapons.
Stupid blanket policies like "don't hire anyone with 3.0 GPA, no matter what". So someone from Random Crappy University with a 4.0 will make it to first round (and usually gets dismissed, but they still got to talk to us). Someone with a 2.8 from a reputable institution, however, will not even get a phone call, even if we talked to them and know that there were reasons behind it (one bad year where family problems got in the way, and poof you go), and no matter how much we beg, it won't go through HR. That, is really stupid.
He means The Odyssey. It's Achilles' ghost who says it. He's saying it's better to have a lousy job than to be the king of all the dead -- in other words, "Don't give me any of your bull about death, Odysseus. Being dead sucks."
You're not thinking very far ahead. Who's to say that the people who can afford to buy the information will choose to disclose it? Perhaps they will only disclose it to other wealthy elite?
Also, consider this: Many revolutionary factions assume that when their members get captured, they will be tortured. They furthermore assume that nobody is strong enough not to sing under torture. So they set up a policy: keep your mouth shut for 48 hours. Suck it up for that long. After 48 hours, tell them anything and everything you want. Sing like bird. Tell the truth! It won't matter. 48 hours is long enough to erase any embarrassing fact, or any compromising truth, rendering any confessions worthless.
Nah, and it's also arbitrary. If it supported files up to 350MB, that might be big enough to fit an hour-long TV program encoded in MPEG-4 using typical TV-trader settings. That would open up more copyright issues for Google, so one easy stopgap is to limit the maximum file size. Mind you, this won't stop anyone from uploading RAR sets, but at least people won't be streaming those direct from Google Docs.
As the AC below said, files can be up to 50MB each (for now... I see no reason why Microsoft wouldn't up it to compete with Google).
It will work on Linux. It works fine with Firefox, and it even works on Chrome (even though Chrome is not officially supported). I think pretty much any standards-compliant browser should work (though I seem to remember I might have had a problem or two with Konqueror, even though Safari is one of the officially-supported browsers). IE users get a fancier upload tool via ActiveX, but that seems to be about it.
At present, it's sort of a "trial" in the sense that everything is pretty much still in beta. But Microsoft's stated intent is for everything to be ad-supported. I think the idea is to get initial revenue from ad sales, then hook customers into Microsoft's commercial desktop software.
On the downside, I didn't think the SkyDrive UI was all that impressive. Google Docs changes things up by presenting files as a chronological series based on what you've accessed most recently, kind of like an email inbox. SkyDrive tries to simulate the files-and-folders desktop paradigm, but it's really just for show. You don't have any of the flexibility of being able to drag and drop files, for example. It's a lot of clicking and waiting for page refreshes.
The UI for the Office Web Apps really is very slick, though, and they also seem to work fine with any modern, standards-compliant browser. (And that means not with IE6 -- it's not supported.)
It's not 250MB total storage space. It's 250MB maximum per file. It's probably true that most e-mail clients/servers do a poor job of handling 250MB attachments. In that sense, this is probably a good thing; we've all complained about the coworker who sends out a 15MB movie of their kids playing with the dog to a mailing list, but what option do most average users have? Even if they know what FTP is, they don't own any servers. If Google is going to handhold consumers through the process of storing big files in the Web instead of sending them as attachments, I say bravo.
Microsoft is moving into the ad-supported online hosting biz with SkyDrive. Looking at my SkyDrive right now, it tells me I have 24.99GB available space (I'm not really using it for anything). Among other uses, once Office 2010 ships, SkyDrive will be a portal to the Office 2010 Web Apps. If you upload Office documents to your SkyDrive, you will be able to click on them and view/edit them in your browser, without owning your own copy of Office.
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You say it, but you don't support it. What about being in NYC is necessary for the business operations of a global newspaper? You know, the MBA type stuff? The logistical type stuff? Pretty much everything but the gathering of news that occurs in NYC?
I don't know. Maybe nothing. But if moving to Akron, Ohio would solve all their money problems, don't you think one of those MBAs would have proposed it? Obviously the cost outweighs the benefit.
Moving to the new building when they did does seem like a cluster-fuck, but it's too late to change that decision now. Apparently they are taking steps to minimize the financial impact of that decision.
And if worse came to worst and the New York Times came to Mayor Bloomberg and said, "We can't afford to operate in New York anymore," do you honestly think he'd just shake their hand, pat them on the back, and let them leave?
I think you're fixating on a non-issue. The problems at the Times run far deeper than the real estate it might own.
Still, there's such a thing as letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I don't advocate giving anybody a free pass, but why are a few missteps reason enough to give everybody an automatic fail, no matter how high a standard they set?
Hmm. A lot of it certainly does seem to be available for free. And yet when I go to economist.com without logging in, mouse over to the picture of this week's cover, and click the link that says "Full Content," I get a page telling me that this page is available only to subscribers. Furthermore, they advertise "full access" to the Economist Online as one of their main subscriber benefits. (shrugs)
BTW, I find it paradoxical that you say you never would have dreamed of subscribing if you couldn't get all the content for free. What's the logic there?
It's not as if the New York Times has remained silent on this issue.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times, said in a statement: ''We respect and commend the Pulitzer board for its decision on this complex and sensitive issue. All of us at The Times are fully aware of the many defects in Walter Duranty's journalism, as we have and will continue to acknowledge. We regret his lapses, and we join the Pulitzer board in extending sympathy to those who suffered as a result of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine.''
Since then, the coverage from the Times has been much more sensitive to the issue. (Random article.)
the life style is: a laptop. thats it.
Well... a laptop, a phone, plane tickets, hotel rooms, meals, gas, car repair, and Internet access, I reckon. Tom Friedman's column seems to mostly be about flying around, talking to various CEOs and other luminaries, then writing about how Tom Friedman has fascinating conversations with CEOs and other luminaries.
Long before the Internet, there was only one phone company in a given locality.
Actually, long before the Internet, there was only one phone company. Perhaps you're not old enough to remember leasing your phone from Ma Bell (yes, your physical phone, like a cable box).
Today, phone companies have become mini-monopolies again, but they don't get to operate with total impunity. They're not allowed to charge you to call 911, for example. Why? It's a public good.
As for ISPs bundling access to media, my model is something like how TV stations used to work. Remember all those "public service announcements" that would come on, reminding kids not to talk to strangers or telling you not to drink and drive? Stations were required to air these messages by the government. It was one way they fulfilled their social contract. We gave them exclusive, monopoly access to the TV airwaves -- you and I aren't allowed to just start our own TV stations -- and in return, they have to do just a little bit for the public good. Or had to. It doesn't seem to be that way anymore so much. Similarly, cable companies used to be required to carry CSPAN and offer a public access channel, because they were deemed to be good for society.
Is access to respectable, thorough journalism not a public good? If journalism just disappears and all we have left are amateur blogs, what impact would that have on the health of our society? I think it would be dramatic.
We're giving ISPs monopolies -- or at the very least, de facto monopolies -- just like the phone companies. Is it too much to ask that they give something back, in the form of subsidizing journalism?
I don't even see why they should complain about it. ISPs are free to compete on raw pipe, but why should they not be able to add additional value? I'm in favor of Net Neutrality. But let's suppose YouTube went to a closed, subscription model. If one ISP offered raw pipe and another one offered pipe plus "free YouTube" (meaning ISP-subsidized YouTube), would that be so terrible? This model might be a way to talk ISPs into accepting Net Neutrality, because it would allow them new ways to compete.
I've only recently been turned on to this and I agree, the audio edition of The Economist is fantastic. I honestly don't know how they do it every week.
OK, now you're running around in circles. I ask what newspaper has more eyeballs than the New York Times. You say only people with "excess money" read it. I tell you it's free right now. You say nobody reads it because nobody wants to read it, because they don't believe it's "high quality." Here's where I remind you that the New York Times has won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other news-gathering organization, and it gets more traffic than any other online newspaper (but the eyeballs still aren't paying the bills). What's your next argument? Nobody reads it because all its articles are in Chinese?
Yeah, but did your friend ever work for the New York Times? Some publications -- and by extension, some journalists -- have a stronger reputation than others. Saying the Times does nothing but pass off op-eds as news without citing any examples is kinda like saying, "Oh, I hear Obama is as bad as Hitler" without even knowing what the United States is.
I'm sure doing business in NYC ain't cheap - do they really need an entire building in midtown Manhattan?
The New York Times management has made mistakes, but they aren't complete dummies. They don't actually have an entire building in midtown Manhattan anymore. But as far as being a "global newspaper of record," being based in what some have called the "capital city of the world" isn't a bad idea.
When was the last time you read an article that included a direct quote? Or asked someone a pertinent question? Or hell, even showed any knowledge of the subject material?
What?
Every news story on the front page of the New York Times includes direct quotes. They are reported by real reporters, working in the actual locations where news is taking place -- so I'd say their knowledge of the subject matter is considerable.
Maybe the more pertinent question is, just what is it you have been reading that you've been calling "news"? You're pointing the finger at journalism, but maybe the real problem is closer to home than you think.
maybe the question should be "what paper has more eyeballs belonging to people with excess money"...
Not at all. The New York Times requires registration, but it's free. That's not bringing in the advertisers, apparently.
so, what newspaper do you work for?
I've worked for the San Francisco Chronicle in the past but most of my work has appeared in tech trade publications, most particularly InfoWorld, where I spent several years as a senior editor. It's not like I make any secret about it.
or perhaps consistently and copiously write articles that everyone wants to read because they are high quality ... which, oddly enough, brings back advertisers when there are lots of eyeballs
Unfortunately, that has not been proven.
I mean, seriously ... what newspaper has more eyeballs than the freakin' New York Times?
The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases
What can I say? Citation needed.
I find some of the anti-journalism bias I see on this site to be a little scary. It seems like the kind of anti-intellectualism that allows our society to play right into the hands of propagandists and demagogues, and it's frankly not what I'd expect of the /. audience.
The three posts I'm seeing so far all assume this will be the death knell of the Times. But the alternative if nothing changes is for the Times to piss all its money away until it closes its doors in bankruptcy. There has to be a happy medium. Somebody has to try to find it, and that's what the New York Times is doing now.
mrphoton says he'll read www.bbc.co.uk instead. That's all well and good, but the BBC is supported by British taxes, while the New York Times is a private newspaper. There's a strong tradition of separation of media and government in the U.S. and it isn't likely to ever change. But some have proposed operating newspapers as nonprofit organizations, which may be a close compromise. In that arrangement, newspapers would essentially be relying on government to leave them alone, by not charging them taxes. Where their operating expenses would come from, however, remains an open question.
To me, charging subscription fees for access to content makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite publications, The Economist, has always had a pay-wall around most of its content. And while advertising rates for magazines have been dropping across the board, subscriptions to The Economist have actually been climbing in the last few years. Why? Cynics say it's because people want to look intellectual by carrying around a copy of The Economist that they actually never read. People who subscribe to The Economist say they do so because of the marked differences between it and other, more traditional newspapers: The Economist prints zero celebrity gossip, and it never fiddles around with stories about car crashes or green gardening. It has a global focus. Its stories are well-researched, thorough, and not dumbed-down. In other words, if I'm going to pay to have someone deliver a stack of printed pages to my mailbox every week, The Economist will bring me far less wasted paper.
It's also mentioning that The Economist does not print any bylines for its articles. So to Tom Friedman's complaints, cry me a river. Do I subscribe to the New York Times because I want an informative, timely, in-depth news resource, or do I subscribe because I like to read so-called rock star columnists? Personally, I don't even read Tom Friedman's column, because his books have been massive disappointments. Talk about overrated. So should a guy like Tom Friedman be allowed to hold an entire news gathering organization hostage to his own ego? Tell you what, Tom: If you're such a public treasure, start a blog. Surely the people will flock to it. Or could it be that the only reason anybody read your column at all was because of the New York Times, and not the other way around?
The success of a subscription program for the Times' Web site will probably all depend on the price they charge for it. Certainly there will have to be opportunities to get stuff for free, as Salon.com has done. Even The Economist offers a 14-day free trial. Even then, the idea that anyone will pay even a fraction of the cost of a subscription to the New York Times just to read one or two articles a week -- or one or two articles a month -- is nuts. Somebody needs to do the hard research to figure out a realistic rate of payment for the content that people actually read. A monthly or yearly subscription fee, when nothing is showing up in the mailbox and you never remember to go and look at the site, isn't going to work.
At the same time, I worry about the concept of newspapers as a public good. Everyone, no matter their income level, is entitled to know what's going on in their government and the world at large. If newspapers close themselves off only to paying subscribers, you force the economically disadvantaged to venues such as TV news. On the one hand, local TV news has been turned over almost entirely to fluff. On the other, cable outlets like Fox News look increasingly like propaganda weapons.
So what to do? I've long tho
Stupid blanket policies like "don't hire anyone with 3.0 GPA, no matter what". So someone from Random Crappy University with a 4.0 will make it to first round (and usually gets dismissed, but they still got to talk to us). Someone with a 2.8 from a reputable institution, however, will not even get a phone call, even if we talked to them and know that there were reasons behind it (one bad year where family problems got in the way, and poof you go), and no matter how much we beg, it won't go through HR. That, is really stupid.
Bizarre. I would never list my GPA on my resume.
He means The Odyssey. It's Achilles' ghost who says it. He's saying it's better to have a lousy job than to be the king of all the dead -- in other words, "Don't give me any of your bull about death, Odysseus. Being dead sucks."
Actually in the European Union and associated trading partners.
Whatever that means. Pretty sure the United States is an EU trading partner, but "scotch" is not a protected trade name here.
You're not thinking very far ahead. Who's to say that the people who can afford to buy the information will choose to disclose it? Perhaps they will only disclose it to other wealthy elite?
Also, consider this: Many revolutionary factions assume that when their members get captured, they will be tortured. They furthermore assume that nobody is strong enough not to sing under torture. So they set up a policy: keep your mouth shut for 48 hours. Suck it up for that long. After 48 hours, tell them anything and everything you want. Sing like bird. Tell the truth! It won't matter. 48 hours is long enough to erase any embarrassing fact, or any compromising truth, rendering any confessions worthless.
Nah, and it's also arbitrary. If it supported files up to 350MB, that might be big enough to fit an hour-long TV program encoded in MPEG-4 using typical TV-trader settings. That would open up more copyright issues for Google, so one easy stopgap is to limit the maximum file size. Mind you, this won't stop anyone from uploading RAR sets, but at least people won't be streaming those direct from Google Docs.
As the AC below said, files can be up to 50MB each (for now... I see no reason why Microsoft wouldn't up it to compete with Google).
It will work on Linux. It works fine with Firefox, and it even works on Chrome (even though Chrome is not officially supported). I think pretty much any standards-compliant browser should work (though I seem to remember I might have had a problem or two with Konqueror, even though Safari is one of the officially-supported browsers). IE users get a fancier upload tool via ActiveX, but that seems to be about it.
At present, it's sort of a "trial" in the sense that everything is pretty much still in beta. But Microsoft's stated intent is for everything to be ad-supported. I think the idea is to get initial revenue from ad sales, then hook customers into Microsoft's commercial desktop software.
On the downside, I didn't think the SkyDrive UI was all that impressive. Google Docs changes things up by presenting files as a chronological series based on what you've accessed most recently, kind of like an email inbox. SkyDrive tries to simulate the files-and-folders desktop paradigm, but it's really just for show. You don't have any of the flexibility of being able to drag and drop files, for example. It's a lot of clicking and waiting for page refreshes.
The UI for the Office Web Apps really is very slick, though, and they also seem to work fine with any modern, standards-compliant browser. (And that means not with IE6 -- it's not supported.)
Oh, and currently SkyDrive only supports files up to 50MB in size.
250mb is pretty paltry by their standards
It's not 250MB total storage space. It's 250MB maximum per file. It's probably true that most e-mail clients/servers do a poor job of handling 250MB attachments. In that sense, this is probably a good thing; we've all complained about the coworker who sends out a 15MB movie of their kids playing with the dog to a mailing list, but what option do most average users have? Even if they know what FTP is, they don't own any servers. If Google is going to handhold consumers through the process of storing big files in the Web instead of sending them as attachments, I say bravo.
Microsoft is moving into the ad-supported online hosting biz with SkyDrive. Looking at my SkyDrive right now, it tells me I have 24.99GB available space (I'm not really using it for anything). Among other uses, once Office 2010 ships, SkyDrive will be a portal to the Office 2010 Web Apps. If you upload Office documents to your SkyDrive, you will be able to click on them and view/edit them in your browser, without owning your own copy of Office.