Google wants to control all the ways people search the web so that they don't have to share profits and so that a competitor can't emerge. That's why we have Maps (location), Android (mobile), Home & Assistant (voice), and Chrome (URL bar).

GMail and whatever their chat is called this week (social), Daydream (VR/AR).

Gmail isn’t there because they want to search your email. It’s there because they want you to sign in.

Google indexes every invoice you get. If you use gmail they know exactly what you order at which store.

That feature did not exist until Inbox, years later.

I still feel like I've been kicked in the groin every time I open Gmail and it isn't Inbox.

Bastards!

I suppose I'm probably a fool to continue expecting that they'll eventually get around to bringing Inbox's bundles over to Gmail, like they said they were going to.

How would you be able to tell if it existed earlier? Anyway the point is it exists now.

Because I personally (with many collaborators, of course) wrote that feature.

Thanks for highlighting the truth. There’s far too much FUD in the comments section these days, especially with respect to FAANG companies I’ve noticed in recent months.

Or it's there for both of those reasons... Not an either or situation

GMail is there mostly as a legacy of a time when Google had legit competition from portal sites like Yahoo and MSN. E-mail was an important part of that portal and GMail was a way to siphon some users.

You can make up as many fictional backstories as you want, but gmail was launched because signed-in users enjoy vastly better search quality and prior to gmail there was no reason to associate your identity with Google.

You don't need to be signed-in to track someone with a cookie and provide targeted search results.

You do to be tracked consistently across different devices and browsers.

From the outside, it looked like GDocs, GMail, and crew were originally created for internal use because engineering Googlers used Linux and hated Windows. Microsoft was still quite the enemy in teh early 00's after all. Along the way a few someones figured out that they could offer it as a product outside the company as a means to attack Microsoft more broadly.

Is that view incorrect?

Google Docs was acquired, so I don't think so. You might be right about Calendar, because there is nothing in the world that a Googler or anyone else hates more than Oracle Calendar.

My overarching view on Google's evolution is that their real product is dirt-cheap computing facilities, and their products are often just a way to exploit that capacity. Part of Gmail's genesis was an abundance of underutilized hard drives. YouTube was acquired because they already had the networking in place to operate it. Inbox Smart Reply was a way to use a novel and cheap ML inference device to launch a feature that nobody else could afford. In all these cases the infrastructure existed first and the products emerged to fill them.

Ha! GMail offered the most free space, by an order of magnitude over its competitors, and that's the primary reason it succeeded in drawing users initially.

Email search wasn't the draw initially, and wasn't even all that much better; there was serious controversy over search, years later, as it was tied to ads that reflected the content of private communications.

Hotmail, Yahoo et al had reasonably good search for the time, but stiflingly little free space. Google offered far more free space with IMAP and POP3 access.

Your argument is about why users moved to gmail. jeffbee is saying Google created GMail to have users signed in so that they could give better search results through personalization.

Daydream is dead, just fyi

Reading this comment thread was a recordbreaking Google experience of ‘Daydream sounds cool’ to ‘they killed it’.

Ha! They’d been pulling back support for quite a while but it’s fully deprecated now. The android+cardboard VR model just doesn’t make sense with current gen VR headsets.

> why go through the headache of opening it up to other businesses?

Such a platform is obviously necessary for the Internet; Google exposing Maps (& related APIs) makes it less likely that another company will build the default platform for map APIs on the Internet.

commoditize your complement

my guess/understanding is that every team at Google is under significant pressure to monetize. Unlike the old days where there was more of a strategy of "build anything that brings people in, search/ads will monetize those eyeballs".

The 2018 google maps price increase could have given some execs HUGE bonuses under that new model, even if it isn't ideal from a Google-wide standpoint

Before the 2018 price increase I was convinced Google didn't care to have lots of little customers paying for Google Maps. It was all peanuts compared to their main income

I so so much appreciate this article. Google's maps dominance has been frustrating me, both as a user who wants innovation, and as a developer who wants affordable access. Very excited to read about these combined efforts (and, like you said, anti-tragedies-of-the-commons)

Thank you!

Without opening a platform, competitors and would be service providers have a clear investor story. By opening a platform, Google undermine their story to investors, making it look like a commodity. Then, each time a competitor is diffused, Google can cripple the service or raise the price so much as to make it useless.

For me, as an OSM contributorm it was incredibly sad to read

> the incredible year OpenStreetMap is having, largely because of enormous investment from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Mapbox (FAAMm)

Their contributions were (as far as I know) not really important compared to what was contributed by hobbyists, and overall their activities likely caused more damage than benefit. Mostly due to associating OSM with toxic brands such as Facebook or Amazon and discouraging new contributors.

Note that linked article seems to be not supporting this claim that 2020 is successful for OSM mostly due to corporations.

Just wanted to say thanks for the entertaining article, I learned a lot and especially enjoyed the FAAMm acronym XD.