Not my experience. UX was more or less in line with everyone else, UI just looked cleaner and prettier because it didn't yet have obtrusive ads compared to the competition.

Gmail was groundbreaking because it offered 1GB of storage at launch compared to measly 100MB or so from Yahoo or Microsoft.

Google brand name + invite only scarcity at launch + huge storage space + no ads at launch = the formula the drove initial popularity.

Why would anyone do that?

Part of the trend of needing to dumb down everything by removing "power" user features because we can't trust non-computer savvy users to not self immolate their data.

Sure, they were innovative to use XHR along lots of Javascript to improve the experience, but what got people into were the 1GB + no ads.

Nowadays, they probably offer one of the worst email experience, with ads and terrible privacy. How many times have we heard about the US government reading emails from other governments countries, like US spying on ex-presidents from Brazil regarding oil companies?

Google had also the coolness factor of the "don't be evil" and being overall a lean and trustful company. Nowadays nobody thinks of Google like this.

gmail did away with the idea of folders and instead had tags. They were very clearly an innovation on top of how most organization happened with email.

granted, those tags were shunted into folders for the IMAP protocol, but if you were using the web UI it was a whole other world.

The rest of the world caught up, but at the time they were absolutely groundbreaking. yahoo and hotmail existed at the time but neither had anything on gmail.

All 10 are category defining (but at least top 3) products. I'd like to have a 1-trick pony like that one day!

Not perfectly, I’d still like a good calendar based around sharing and collab, but the best out there.

I think we need a good decentralized calendar that treats all calendars as peers. Outlook and google treat a single server as being the authority and everything has to go to those servers for actions. I’d rather see something like a calendar blob for individuals that gets sent around and rehosted lots of places like git. Or at least the availability. It’s still funny to me how hard it is to tell someone off server what your availability is.

> rest is only buy/copy/steal.

Go check the wikipedia page for those products and scroll to the “History” section. You might be surprised how the common thread is “another company was doing X, and then”.

For the office suite tools they offer (calendar, docs, gmail and drive), they were the first to move to the cloud, but nowadays there are so many companies with similar offerings that are either cheaper or better.

Even Microsoft nowadays has Excel on the cloud, which let's all be frank. It's much superior.

Before I do look like a google hater, I use a Pixel, pay for Google drive etc, but I know how nowadays I have so much more interesting choices(better privacy, better phones etc) and don't move out mostly out of laziness.

YouTube was bought as well.

Android was bought as well.

Ads, YouTube and Android are valuable tech. Analytics, Gmail, Docs, Calendar are all shitty apps. Not in the sense that they're bad, just in the sense that there's nothing innovative about them.

Of everything that you mentioned in your list, the only ones that are genuine Google innovations are Search and Maps.

Do Gmail’s innovation was “lots of space and search works as well as google.”

The promotions and social tabs are nice but I’d probably rather those all just went to spam instead.

Yahoo mail is better for me because it implements the use of tabs, making e-mail multitasking a breeze. Also Yahoo's UI is more compact and less wasteful of screen real estate and just feels snappier while Gmail feels sluggish even on modern machines.

So yes, there's definitely room for Gmail to evolve beyond just barebones sending and receiving emails, as there's dozens of other companies who can do that just the same or better, because otherwise why use Gmail beyond the Google brand name, network effect, and integration to the wider Google-Chrome-Android ecosystem which is it's biggest strength and selling point, but as a stand alone email service it's pretty lackluster and unimpressive.

There exists only 2 kinds of tools.

The kinds people complain about And the kinds nobody use.

Yahoo is definitely the latter.

Like my other mail clients.

This is most successful companies though. Companies are lucky to have a single good idea. So I don’t think it’s a valid criticism to say “all McDonald’s had was franchising systematic food production” as that’s a big deal and it’s carried then all these decades. Or “all Toyota had was their production assembly method” etc etc.

I think companies are typically a really good idea and then many years of optimizing that idea and process innovation.

Uh, no, they gave 1GB at the time, when the most you would get was usually either 100MB or 250MB (i think that was what Hotmail was offering at the time?).

GMail was a game-changer at the time, though.

The search features were incredibly fast and super accurate, the UI would refresh immediately (AJAX before it was cool, essentially, nobody was doing that at the time) and their anti-spam was top-notch. Literally, spam was not an issue anymore.

Oh, and it was super fast and very lightweight: I had a P3 with 128MB ram at the time of launch, but it would still run incredibly well.

I managed to get an invitation from a friend, and I loved it.

Nowadays... It's almost saddening.