REDMOND, Washington (CNN) -- Within hours of Google's announcement of a new webmail service, Microsoft has responded with major changes to their popular Hotmail webmail service.
According to people working on the Hotmail service, Microsoft has recently committed itself to purchasing 35 million terabytes of server storage, enough to give each and every Hotmail user 1 Terabyte of storage.
According to computer science experts, this would allow for 500 million mail messages. This is enough to have approximately 2700 new messages a day, every day, for 500 years.
When asked why any user would need 1 terabyte of storage, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said "It's 1000 times more than Google. That's why."
Industry experts say the arms race of e-mail storage could prove detrimental to the industry.
"Soon we'll be seeing 10 TB storage, and then 50 Petabyte storage. Within a few years, e-mail storage will exceed the amount of data that has been created in the history of the universe," says CNN senior technologist Sue Kroll.
Gates insists that the move is necessary. "How many times have you tried to send a backup image of your 500 computer network to yourself via e-mail, only to have it bounce back? Now that won't be a problem."
CNN's Kevin Flower, Melissa Gray, Sue Kroll, Vivian Paulsen and Wesley Rosenblum contributed to this report.
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