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Comment by emersion | Hacker News Reader

>When I sign up for gmail, I can just be myself. I don't have to be myself + something else.

Well, it's still you + gmail.com. It could be you + fastmail.com, it could be you + posteo.de, it could be you + <insert other e-mail provider>. You still chose gmail over another provider, like you could choose cucumbers.pizza over another provider in the case of the Fediverse.

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If i remember correctly gmail was offering unlimited storage and thats what won me over.

Did they at one point offer unlimited, or was it always just a really large amount (which in today's landscape isn't that large anymore).

They never exactly offered unlimited, it was just that the limit was constantly going up. You could watch your total storage ticking.

It was 1Gb initially, then on their 1st birthday 2Gb and slowly growing daily, which seemed practically unlimited compared to other email that were offering 100Mb at the most? A quick look at an article[1] at the time (who claimed it was "outrageous") show Hotmail were offering 250Mb and Yahoo had just launched 1Gb to catch up.

[1] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/gmail-rewards-users-with...

Yes, "it's still you + gmail.com". And some of us will refuse to use that address.

The point was that GMail became so ubiquitus as to no longer be a part of the equation. I remember in 2009~ forms automatically adding @gmail.com.

Then this could not be the reason they won—initially it was not the “ubiquity of gmail” as it was just new to the market and could not be synonymous with email. They won by providing a good service for free with an ever-increasing capacity and iterating over features. Note that I’m not suggesting it was perfect or the best solution; plenty of questionable decisions made along the way (the way inbox was handled comes to mind)

That is the argument, that for a time it was in practice a default choice, just a bit before that the default choice was hotmail, at least in italy.

The problem (if we're assuming it was one) still existed in the initial days of Gmail. Point still stands.

...but gmail isn't that ubiquitous! A large majority of the emails I receive are from non-gmail addresses. True, most of these are related to where people work, but still, it drives decentralization, and I think most people understand that email ≠ gmail.

Many of those mails from non Google domains are still being processed by Gmail under the hood. Last I checked, I think Google was processing something like 2/3 of all email.

Really! I'm surprised, Exchange in particular seems to be pretty ubiquitous in the business world.

Not to mention, I do know a fair number of people with non-gmail personal addresses—iCloud, Outlook.com, Yahoo etc.

Hm, on second thought I just did a quick search and I think I was wrong and it's maybe more like in the range of 1/4 to 1/3. Also, am thinking there may not even be a way to measure this very easily outside of just random surveys or trying to gather data separately from major providers.

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