Your enthusiasm for gmail has blinded you to the reality. Sure it might be the best thing to you since sliced bread, but in every market estimate, gmail still trails behind hotmail and yahoo mail which means that for most people, gmail is not a radical improvement.

http://www.quantcast.com/profile/trafficGraph?wunit=wd%3Acom...

http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/gmailvs-hotm...

Of course, since you are only a college freshman, I don't blame you for not knowing that there were dozens of serviceable webmail clients long before the existence of gmail.

What does his being a college freshman have to do with the argument? I call ad hominem.

It has everything to do with the argument.

He thinks that Google invented or revolutionized webmail, maps, etc... when it is clear to anyone who's been on the internet for more than 8 years that they were only incremental updates.

It's all subjective, but for me the usability enhancements of GMail are far, FAR more than evolutionary.

It's curious that you mention college freshmen because GMail saves Universities boatloads of money in infrastructure costs.

I think it's curious that you would try and argue this.

Before Google sold gmail to colleges, my college and many others used squirrelmail and pine which was more than adequate. Any sizable college that had an IT department that could support email anyway.

you know, something like yahoo mail...