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Comment by bibinou | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that Gmail was way better than its competitors at the time. The spam filter alone was a huge sell.

edit: the 1GB mailbox !

Yeah, back then Hotmail gave you something like 10MB and everyone literally thought 1GB was an April Fools' Day hoax. If Stadia was literally 100x better than the nearest competition while still having a far superior user experience then they wouldn't be having any trouble.

Plus, they were not yet notorious for killing services after a few years. It's becoming a self-fulfilled prophecy with newer Google products that need a critical mass to take off.

blame the new era of fiscal discipline at google.

products have to make an appreciable difference in the bottom line

the fact that it didnt catch on then says it was not better than its competitors.

hotmail had that nice tie in with messenger, which was a huge plus

other emails had the ability to delete email

google tried to use email for ads which users found creepy

google had an invite system that made signing up difficult

etc etc

Are you saying Gmail didn't catch on? That's like saying nobody buys an Android phone. Gmail is the #1 email provider in the world and Android is the #1 mobile OS in the world.

Yeah but it isn’t very profitable in the grand scheme of things. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google had only made around $23 billion in profit from Android from inception until around 2016.

They pay Apple around $8 billion a year to be the default search. Apple has made more from Google in mobile than Google has made from Android.

It didnt catch on till 2012. It was also gmail that caused a change in public perception of google

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