[harrall]

I just don’t think your opinion is shared by most people.

Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, people are always telling me how they prefer Google Docs over everything else and their only competition is Microsoft.

Yes it’s free but there is no other service that I rather switch to, and I actually pay for additional storage.

[kelnos]

> Gmail is the most popular email service in the world

That's because it's been around for quite a while, and for a long time it was the best webmail service. It's also free, unlike most alternatives. And switching to a new provider means a new email address, unless you're using a custom domain with Google Workspace (or whatever they call it these days), which is a small minority of personal accounts.

(I gave up on Gmail a few years ago and switched to Fastmail, and like it much more than Gmail. But I'm the rare person who is willing to pay for email, and had been using a custom domain with Gmail, so my non-monetary switching costs were minimal.)

[rmunn]

You're absolutely right that Gmail was the best webmail service when it launched, and for some time afterwards. How many people now commenting on HN remember when Gmail launched? Remember how revolutionary it was at the time? Every other email webapp, when you clicked on an email, would refresh the page. Gmail, when you clicked on an email, did not cause a browser navigation. It simply replaced the page contents with the contents of the email.

We're so used to setting webapps do this that we take this for granted, but Gmail was the first email webapp to do this. It's possible it was the first webapp, period, to do this; I feel like Gmail's use of XmlHttpRequest was innovative at the time.

Fast forward twenty years, and what about Gmail is innovative today? Nothing that I can think of. It's mediocre (there are lots of filtering improvements they could make that they aren't making, for example), and everything that made it good has been copied by other webmail clients. There's no particular reason except momentum to stay on Gmail.

[manwe150]

Gmail spam filtering also used to be revolutionary and an unsung hero. I haven’t put effort into finding out if other options have caught up with that (because of aforementioned tedium of changing email addressed)

[rmunn]

I have had a pobox.com email address (just a forwarding one) longer than I've had a Gmail one, and their spam filtering was pretty amazing too. Even before I set my pobox.com address to forward to Gmail, I never saw very much spam.

Now that Pobox is owned by Fastmail, I rather suspect that Fastmail is going to have the same good spam filtering. Can't speak from experience, though, as I haven't actually used my new Fastmail account yet (it still forwards to Gmail, and so far I haven't switched. Momentum, again).

[skydhash]

You can’t beat free. The Fastmail web interface is snappier than gmail. And you can’t beat dedicated mail clients like thunderbolt in terms of workflow.

Google doc is wordpad level with very good collaboration (but that’s mostly what people need). People were fine with typewriters, so they are fine with a word processor like google doc. But it’s not at the level of even Libreoffice or Apple’s page in terms of features.

[phs318u]

By any definition of good usability, Gmail is not good and Google Docs are not far behind. It’s not that they are functionally bad, just really poor UX.

[andybak]

That's hyperbole. They have flaws, but at the very least, when they were launched, they were arguably best in class. I'm not sure how much me sticking with them is due to familiarity and muscle memory but I know they won we over purely on merit in the beginning.

[phs318u]

As someone who was an original invitee to Gmail it was the clarity of function that was the differentiator. They were “grown up” and acknowledged user agency vs their competitors.

But as others have mentioned, they operating model of Google as a company incentivises creating products but does not incentivise refining it. Gmail has gotten far richer in functionality but at the same time the interface has gotten far less consistent. Their competitors (mainly Microsoft but not only them) also got richer functionality, but they also paid attention to UX. While none are perfect, there are definitely some better than others. Familiarity definitely breeds inertia though, I’ll grant that.

[soco]

We probably talk to different sets of people, as I don't even know anybody who ever used Google Docs.

[hparadiz]

I've been at multiple companies where Google Drive and Docs/Sheets are the only thing people use.

[coldtea]

That's because the execs force them.

[hparadiz]

LMAO Why the fuck would I wanna install office on my mac.

[coldtea]

Woosh

[andybak]

That's really surprising to me.

[anthonyskipper]

You should checkout startups. They would blow your mind.