http://wordpress.com/blog/2008/01/21/three-gigabytes/

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

The calculus has changed, my friends. This has been the one major glaring problem in www.wordpress.com, and it's exciting to see it fixed.

That's going to be a problem. 3 GB = a lot of automated crap dumping into WordPress blogs. I don't think they're prepared for that.

Not only that, to increase your storage 60-fold with no revenue stream or source to back it makes very little business sense, given the crowd that would traditionally use WordPress.

This is going to come back to bite them in the ***.

How is WP monetized anyway (besides the store)?

Maybe they felt they were falling behind Blogger? I know they were in terms of the sheer number of spam blogs, but I guess this makes them feel more attractive. It's what people complain about most in here when comparing the two free versions.

Still I haven't used hafl a meg.