[shakna]

At least in my area, 3 things made Gmail win, and it's a strategy I don't think can win again.

1. Gmail was invite only. It was a badge of prestige, and invites were only handed over to close friends and suck-ups.

2. Deleting emails was a regular need, but Gmail increased your space every time you logged in.

3. Spam protection. Overnight your inbox no longer needed to be pruned for actual emails.

None of those three things is revolutionary anymore.

Spam protection is harder now, and spam senders are more intelligent.

Invite-only things are viewed with suspicion, not excitement.

Most messaging services have enough space per user that deleting messages isn't a concern anymore.

Maybe someone else can revolutionise, but it won't be based on those features. A new strategy will be needed.

[naasking]

I'm surprised you didn't list better search capabilities. GMail was the first email service I used that fundamentally changed the way I organize my email workflow.

[ezequiel-garzon]

That’s right. In fact to this day I remember how they prominently advised “search, don’t sort”, a true paradigm shift. Searching in my local drive could take minutes, while Gmail would take a few seconds.

[xorcist]

None of these things were new, more inbox space and better spam protection were available for real email services. But the point of every other free email service at the time, including Hotmail post acquisition, was to upsell you their paid service.

They were therefore crippled in these ways, and purposefully limited to a storage space just large enough to be useful if you went to the trouble of cleaning out large emails regularly. They were also plastered in ads in every way imaginable.

Gmail was a long bet that Google could, with a bit of help from Moore's law, finance a premium email service using the same methods they financed their search engine.

This strategy could absolutely win again, in a market where crippled consumer tools exists for the upsell. For example entry level project tools could easily be something Google could integrate with their office tools. Or indeed if Google crippled their office tools in their ad financed version, someone else could use this strategy against them.

[shakna]

> None of these things were new, more inbox space and better spam protection were available for real email services. But the point of every other free email service at the time, including Hotmail post acquisition, was to upsell you their paid service.

Hotmail and the like required a US address and credit card for their premium service, though.

They weren't options where I was. And nor is it the norm anymore.

[xorcist]

You were simply not part of their business model. The point is that their competitors were all freemium. It's not that their competitors were technically incompetent and didn't know how to buy storage or build spam filters but that they were crippled on purpose.