[adventured]

What meaningful competition was there before? What high quality, amazing service did GMail smash?

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were terrible then, and they're still mostly terrible now.

[vertex-four]

I'm not suggesting that there was meaningful competition before - just that there's no meaningful competition now, contrary to the comment I was replying to which asserted that "the competition got serious".

[msh]

hmm outlook.com and fastmail looks meaningful to me.