Sorry, you are wrong. This is pure revisionism.
Blackberry was absolutely massive before the iPhone, email has always been the largest use of the internet (until media became possible), and Google search became successful because it actually worked, unlike everything available at the time.
I do agree with your sentiment, though. To the user, the UI is the product.
Re:Slack was down
by freehunter on Monday July 29, 2019 @12:13PM
(#20556128)
I owned several Windows Mobile phones, one Blackberry, and one Palm device before iPhone and Android came out. I know the history. They were not popular devices. Even just looking at Blackberry sales by themselves, sales of these devices pre-iPhone were absolutely insignificant [1].
Same thing with email. Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL pre-dated Gmail by quite a long time, but Gmail now owns something like 80% of all webmail traffic.
I think your confusion might be where I said "these things existed but no one really liked them" maybe you read "these things didn't exist before"?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/global-revenue-of...
Hackers like to pretend that presentation doesn't matter, but in the end presentation is the only thing that matters.