81–87 of 87 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.
In the beginning, when Gmail was only accessible by invitation, the killer feature was the relatively huge amount of free storage it offered. 1 gigabyte vs 20 or 100 megabytes at other providers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.
When it first came out, gmail was significantly better than the competition, for the following reasons: 1. _much_ better spam filtering 2. _much_ better searching 3. a _lot_ of storage (no need to delete old emails)
Why do you believe Google is "really good at building useful products"? Would you buy any of them if they didn't have the Google brand (or pay for any of the free ones for that matter)?
I'm sure the Google brand has helped adoption, but I do actually pay for G Suite and it's pretty hard to beat if you're starting a business and want a pretty no-nonsense productivity suite everyone can work together on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.
> GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before That's an objectively incorrect statement. It had: 1. 1GB storage when every other email provider offered like 50 MB at best 2. Superior search 3. Conversational/threaded view for emails 4. Better spam filtering 5. One of the first "dynamic" web applications to use that newfangled "AJAX" stuff to be more responsive and seem faster…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.
The storage limits gmail offered for free was unprecedented, and in my experience they were suddenly far more reliable than their competition. I find it's ability to pick events out of natural language emails and add them to your calendar, remind you if you forgot to attach something but it sounds like you meant to, etc. very useful, and I never saw those before despite continuing to be a regular user of Yahoo and Ho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Gmail came out it was also a gigantic money incinerator into which Google shoveled search ads revenue. It is easy to show that Google used one product line to break into another line of business. It would be harder to convince me that this harmed consumers.
Anti-monopoly law is not meant to prevent companies from investing in different product lines. Monopoly law is meant to prevent companies from using one product to force customers to buy into another product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Promoting stuff on one's own website isn't in any way shape or form illegal.
In the IBM antitrust case, IBM was forced to separate their OS and App businesses. Their OS business had to publish all of their APIs and was not allowed to communicate non-publicly with their App business. This was to prevent IBM from using their OS monopoly to gain an App monopoly. Once you are a monopoly, you can expect such restrictions. What Google is really good at is evading FTC regulation by staying within FC…
This is nonsense. You're insulting the intelligence of everyone reading this.