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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

It is funny because 20 years ago Google was selling itself as the company of the future that would dominate everything in technology. Their "genius" founders were spending billions on new endeavors. In fact, other than the original search engine and associated browser, they only got youtube and other businesses as acquisition (invented by others) and android as a reaction to iOS. Everything else they tried has basically failed or being inexpressive.

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I want to say that Gmail, Google Maps, and Google's office suite represented jumps in usability akin to a total revolution for users. The first two I know for sure were developed in house, and are of course still running strong.

To me this is similar to Apple coming in to established markets and dominating them in short order. Not something to be dismissed IMO.

Google Ads, kubernetes, go to name some more

Gmail might be considered a resounding in-house success, for market penetration & data harvesting potential.

What did Gmail offer that Hotmail or Yahoo didn't? I don't remember why people started using it.

Gmail initially offered very big email storage space comparing the others, and it was going up continuously until its storage area merged with Google Drive.

so basically what made gmail amazing was removed in favor of selling you google one storage subscriptions

Gmail was handing out email accounts with 1Gb of storage for free, when everyone else was only giving like 5mb. It was a no-brainer to switch back then.

- Drastically improved user interface.

- Massive free storage for the time (1GB IIRC).

- Google caliber fast, powerful search across your personal emails.

- Either invented or popularized the modern conversation view for email threads. Most clients would still do one email per reply.

Hotmail and yahoo were pretty much destroyed overnight.

Google has had tremendous success with damned good products: (off the top of my head these are all tremendous)

- search + adwords

- mail

- adsense

- tag manager

- android

- YouTube

- maps

- documents

- storage

- photos

- flights

- groups

- meet

- fi

- captcha

- domains

- translate

- analytics

- tensorflow

- go

- kube

- guava

- googletest

- bigquery

- chrome

- Chromecast (or whatever makes casting universal)

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