[sangnoir]

> Gmail was moderately innovative at the time

Say what now? Perhaps you do not remember that most free email providers had a 2 or 4 MB mailbox limit and you had to delete emails as soon as you read them. When I signed up, Google was offering a whooping 1 gigabyte of storage - an improvement of 3 orders of magnitude. Gmail allowed attachments of up to 25MB which only served to make Hotmail's 4MB mailbox look absurd.

Other email providers (free and paid) struggled with spam filtering (and still do). GMails spam filters are magic, as far as I'm concerned - I never get spam and I also don't even bother checking my spam folder for false positives.

These 2 innovations alone can't be "moderate" by any stretch of the imagination.

[ufmace]

I suppose it's debatable. I'm talking about stuff like the iPhone singlehandedly revolutionizing the touchscreen mobile market, and the iPad essentially creating the tablet market from scratch - they existed before, but were pretty much uniformly awful and I can't remember anybody ever wanting one.

It's not like email or webmail didn't exist before GMail, but I suppose you could argue that the revolutionary at the time use of AJAX plus gigabyte standard storage space, plus great spam filters was enough to transform webmail from a handicapped second-class citizen to something that tech experts would be happy to leave desktop email clients for.

But then, Google Maps was better than the competition, but enough better to be a revolutionary difference? I'd say no. But where do you draw the line between a good refinement of a pre-existing class of application to something that qualifies as revolutionary?

[sangnoir]

> Google Maps was better than the competition, but enough better to be a revolutionary difference

When Google announced turn-by-turn navigation in maps, Garmin's stock price took a tumble. Also, Street View hadn't ever been done before, surely that qualifies?