Comment by Nition

Reminds me of in 2004-2005, I had my typical Hotmail account with 4MB storage, but Microsoft was rolling out a free upgrade for everyone to 250MB. For some reason they were taking an incredibly long time with my account, and I emailed support several times over a year or two about it. Each time they assured me that Microsoft was upgrading accounts as fast as they could, but it was just such a big job that it took years.

Eventually I read on a forum somewhere[1] that you could partly trick the system by temporarily closing your account and re-opening it, which got you a slightly larger 25MB. But still not the promised 250.

All this 2-4MB for existing accounts, 25MB for new accounts, and years-long rollout to 250MB gave the impression that finding spare storage was a huge struggle for Microsoft. Then a few months later they were having to compete with Gmail and they decided that everyone should get 2GB, which was rolled out to every Hotmail account including mine all at once! I can only assume aliens landed and delivered a UFO full of hard drives.

[1] Here's an example of an old forum post about the trick - complete with reply praising the brand new GMail: https://bimmersport.co.nz/topic/5232-hotmail-upgrade-2mb-to-...