[thiago_fm]

You don't need to be a Google employee to know its products lack innovation from day 1.

It's a one trick pony company, having just created search, rest is only buy/copy/steal.

It's a company rotten to the core.

It bought a few companies back then and helped scale it with capital (Android, YouTube...), also copied others, like there's a whole Netflix documentary about Google Maps.

Don't come saying that Gmail was genius. There were so many free web mail offerings at the time. The only thing they did differently was giving 5GB storage because they never needed to make money with it, as search was a money printer.

Now that there is no ad space left to be added on their products, it's a sinking ship.

Also with their dieing cash cow search business, with Perplexity and OpenAI eating their lunch.

It you still look at Google and don't see IBM, you need new glasses

[mola]

Be fair, Gmail was groundbreaking. It's UX was miles ahead of anything else. Especially webmail UIs. Google was a good product company for a while. But the it wasn't anymore.

[FirmwareBurner]

>It's UX was miles ahead of anything else.

Not my experience. UX was more or less in line with everyone else, UI just looked cleaner and prettier because it didn't yet have obtrusive ads compared to the competition.

Gmail was groundbreaking because it offered 1GB of storage at launch compared to measly 100MB or so from Yahoo or Microsoft.

Google brand name + invite only scarcity at launch + huge storage space + no ads at launch = the formula the drove initial popularity.

[ctvo]

Gmail was the first single page application I remembered using. It was eye opening to many people what the web could be as an application platform. You could compose a message and have it follow you as you read other emails, for example. It was not just about storage space: Gmail was better in every way. Even the spam filter was smarter and better than everyone else’s for a very long time.

[pilaf]

Exactly. It was also one of the first mainstream web apps to make widespread use of XMLHttpRequest. The term AJAX hadn't even been coined at the time of Gmail's release, and it was probably a major factor in the popularization of the technique.

[happymellon]

Then they disabled the delete key from deleting an email.

Why would anyone do that?

[FirmwareBurner]

>Why would anyone do that?

Part of the trend of needing to dumb down everything by removing "power" user features because we can't trust non-computer savvy users to not self immolate their data.

[thiago_fm]

Nah, it was only groundbreaking if you were using Yahoomail.

Sure, they were innovative to use XHR along lots of Javascript to improve the experience, but what got people into were the 1GB + no ads.

Nowadays, they probably offer one of the worst email experience, with ads and terrible privacy. How many times have we heard about the US government reading emails from other governments countries, like US spying on ex-presidents from Brazil regarding oil companies?

Google had also the coolness factor of the "don't be evil" and being overall a lean and trustful company. Nowadays nobody thinks of Google like this.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Your issues with Gmail seem to be the sort that would desolate with privacy wonk nerds, which I suspect are immaterial from Google’s perspective.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I think people have forgotten or weren't around back then.

gmail did away with the idea of folders and instead had tags. They were very clearly an innovation on top of how most organization happened with email.

granted, those tags were shunted into folders for the IMAP protocol, but if you were using the web UI it was a whole other world.

The rest of the world caught up, but at the time they were absolutely groundbreaking. yahoo and hotmail existed at the time but neither had anything on gmail.

[pharmakom]

Exclusivity made everyone think so. Groundbreaking marketing, for a webmail service.

[aitchnyu]

It started the trend of ...drum roll... taking you to the inbox after logging in. Others would take you to a news frontpage or some other crap. When I open a page for AWS and GCP service and I see a marketing page instead of a list of cloud resources, I die a little.

[Maro]

Search, Ads, Analytics, Gmail, Docs, Drive, Youtube, Maps, Android, Calendar..

All 10 are category defining (but at least top 3) products. I'd like to have a 1-trick pony like that one day!

[thiago_fm]

Most of those on your list were either bought/copied/stolen, as mentioned in my comment.

For the office suite tools they offer (calendar, docs, gmail and drive), they were the first to move to the cloud, but nowadays there are so many companies with similar offerings that are either cheaper or better.

Even Microsoft nowadays has Excel on the cloud, which let's all be frank. It's much superior.

Before I do look like a google hater, I use a Pixel, pay for Google drive etc, but I know how nowadays I have so much more interesting choices(better privacy, better phones etc) and don't move out mostly out of laziness.

[iouwhldkfjgklj]

Excel still unrivaled. By comparison Google sheets feels like one of those "I could do that in a weekend" projects.

[iouwhldkfjgklj]

"Ads" was bought (DoubleClick) and in fact I've seen it referred to as the best acquisition in the internet era, as measured by what they paid for it vs the revenue directly attributed to it.

YouTube was bought as well.

Android was bought as well.

Ads, YouTube and Android are valuable tech. Analytics, Gmail, Docs, Calendar are all shitty apps. Not in the sense that they're bad, just in the sense that there's nothing innovative about them.

Of everything that you mentioned in your list, the only ones that are genuine Google innovations are Search and Maps.

[nunez]

Docs was an acquisition iirc.

[latexr]

The commenter you’re replying to was explicit:

> rest is only buy/copy/steal.

Go check the wikipedia page for those products and scroll to the “History” section. You might be surprised how the common thread is “another company was doing X, and then”.

[IAMMidway]

Genuine question: What is category defining about Google Calender? Or even good? In my experience it lacks a lot of features and is kind of clunky.

[Maro]

I worked at roughly 10 companies in my life. Most either used Outlook/Office or Gmail/Calendar/Drive. Personally I hate the Microsoft office productivity stack, and on the other hand, I love using the Google stack, including Calendar.

[prepend]

Different strokes for different folks. I don’t like google calendar and prefer outlook’s. It’s probably the only part of office except Excel that I actually think works well.

Not perfectly, I’d still like a good calendar based around sharing and collab, but the best out there.

I think we need a good decentralized calendar that treats all calendars as peers. Outlook and google treat a single server as being the authority and everything has to go to those servers for actions. I’d rather see something like a calendar blob for individuals that gets sent around and rehosted lots of places like git. Or at least the availability. It’s still funny to me how hard it is to tell someone off server what your availability is.

[latexr]

There’s nothing wrong with you preferring one service over another, but the question was what makes Google Calendar “category defining”.

[prepend]

> It's a one trick pony company

This is most successful companies though. Companies are lucky to have a single good idea. So I don’t think it’s a valid criticism to say “all McDonald’s had was franchising systematic food production” as that’s a big deal and it’s carried then all these decades. Or “all Toyota had was their production assembly method” etc etc.

I think companies are typically a really good idea and then many years of optimizing that idea and process innovation.

[znpy]

> The only thing they did differently was giving 5GB storage because they never needed to make money with it, as search was a money printer.

Uh, no, they gave 1GB at the time, when the most you would get was usually either 100MB or 250MB (i think that was what Hotmail was offering at the time?).

GMail was a game-changer at the time, though.

The search features were incredibly fast and super accurate, the UI would refresh immediately (AJAX before it was cool, essentially, nobody was doing that at the time) and their anti-spam was top-notch. Literally, spam was not an issue anymore.

Oh, and it was super fast and very lightweight: I had a P3 with 128MB ram at the time of launch, but it would still run incredibly well.

I managed to get an invitation from a friend, and I loved it.

Nowadays... It's almost saddening.

[Havoc]

I seem to recall gmail starting with 1gb?

[prepend]

Yep. And it was quickly searchable. I think Hotmail had like 10megs and search sucked.

Do Gmail’s innovation was “lots of space and search works as well as google.”

[bradhe]

Even if Gmail was genius, it's almost 20 years old and hasn't really evolved that much since day 0.

[idontwantthis]

How would you want it to evolve? It shows and sends emails good.

The promotions and social tabs are nice but I’d probably rather those all just went to spam instead.

[FirmwareBurner]

>How would you want it to evolve? It shows and sends emails good.

Yahoo mail is better for me because it implements the use of tabs, making e-mail multitasking a breeze. Also Yahoo's UI is more compact and less wasteful of screen real estate and just feels snappier while Gmail feels sluggish even on modern machines.

So yes, there's definitely room for Gmail to evolve beyond just barebones sending and receiving emails, as there's dozens of other companies who can do that just the same or better, because otherwise why use Gmail beyond the Google brand name, network effect, and integration to the wider Google-Chrome-Android ecosystem which is it's biggest strength and selling point, but as a stand alone email service it's pretty lackluster and unimpressive.

[dartos]

In my life, this is the first positive thing I have ever read/heard about yahoo

[FirmwareBurner]

What's so negative about yahoo mail today? Other than not being a hip cool company like Google.

[dartos]

No idea, but there’s an old adage that goes like:

There exists only 2 kinds of tools.

The kinds people complain about And the kinds nobody use.

Yahoo is definitely the latter.

[010101010101]

They did evolve it with Inbox, and then subsequently killed Inbox to roll worse functionality into Gmail proper.

[happymellon]

I'd like my delete key to delete emails.

Like my other mail clients.

[prepend]

It’s devolved actually. The ui used to be faster and more responsive (remember compact mode?).

[Ekaros]

I remember that it used to categorize mails automatically. Which was nifty feature to me... But I think that was gone years and years ago...