[iso1631]

Google search was two orders of magnitude better. Gmail launched with 1G storage when hotmail offered 10M. Both products launched with exponentially growing customer base too.

Despite that, hotmail still exists.

While first mover doesn't guarantee success, it's certainly an illusion.

[Retric]

Two orders of magnitude is a serious exaggeration. I remember swapping back and forth through multiple search engines well after Google showed up. Search index size and update frequency used to be a much larger issue for me.

Early on I swapped from yahoo mail to gmail to hotmail because gmails spam filtering wasn’t good enough. Among my fiends Gmail really won on UI not space.