Then again I remember arguing with a VP that storage is cheap and email size limits are draconian enough already. She was not pleased.
Maybe it is really just about the budget.
It's entirely possible they aren't even backporting support software like the build tools.
When you are supporting a large number of old versions, it becomes difficult to keep all the quirks and variance straight. On one team where we were only talking about supporting about 4 versions, and were already seeing friction. I was stumping for splitting up the responsibilities across multiple engineers, so that everyone was responsible for knowing the current version, and only one old version, but I don't think the other people saw the trap I was trying to route us around.
When did this feature come into the app? 1.2? 1.3? 2.0? I dunno, but I know it was after 'my' version (1.1).
Example email:
- I want bigger mailbox to handle bigger mails incoming and outgoing. Result: bigger mailbox.
- Then everyone else in the company gets bigger mailboxes. Result: bigger mailbox x1000.
- Also: bigger mail-server backups.
- Also: bigger desktop/user-profile backups, because Outlook duplicates all this info locally.
- Also: bigger storage needs for anything also interacting/duplication selected mail (like CRM, import services, whatever).
- Also: bigger backups needed for all those systems.
- Etc etc.
And IMO it's a perfectly valid claim.
Maybe storage "only" costs $0.1 per 100GB in isolation (or whatever), but for a full company with all systems involved, in aggregate it quickly it may exceed 1000x that.
This doesn't have to be so. Some users have genuine reasons to require more mailbox storage. Not everyone has the same needs. And if 1000 users really need more space, then either they should be given the space they require, or they're doing something wrong that can be solved by technical means (like sending links to large files instead of the files themselves).
> - Also: bigger desktop/user-profile backups, because Outlook duplicates all this info locally.
This can be configured to some extent.
Indeed. Organisations cause them all sorts of problems by not allowing exceptions to the rules.
It's cheap in comparison to the data that a business is saving. That's really expensive data. The people that created the data cost thousands of dollars per month. It would be stupid to save $0.02 if there's even a small chance that someone will need to spend $200 to rewrite a document or reverse engineer some information that they had in an email from a couple years ago. While some data - an installer for 3rd-party software, or photos/video - is pretty large, a single config file or code file that may have been perfected over months or years is just a couple kB, and it's hard to keep the latter useful without the former. And if a customer's $100,000 installation goes down for an extended period of time because you deleted their backup images to save space? You're not getting another order like that from them.