alt Hacker NewsI'm just thinking of my own friends and family, who are mostly not tech nerds and none of whom live in the Bay area. Gmail launched with so much more storage than any other free email service everyone thought it was an April Fools joke (no doubt in part because it was launched on April 1). Everybody wanted it, and nobody who got an invite code before I did would give me theirs.
This is all anecdotal of course. Maybe it wouldn't have worked, but how quickly they gave up was weird.
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I remember laughing with colleagues as the first edition of the evening standard came in with the 1G gmail on the front page. I remember the exact location I saw it too.
couldn’t believe they had fallen for an April fools.
But that was a limited time window when gmail massively outweighed the 10-20mbit of things like hotmail with effectively unlimited storage.
Gmail as a product was simple - a better version of Yahoo or Hotmail where you don't have to worry about storage size nor have to sort emails into various folders. Search worked magically and spam filters were better than anyone else. In short, UX was superior.
Hangouts UX sucked big time. I remember lots of frustrating sessions with my parents about why video calls weren't going through, or how can some random family member join our family thread when they don't have a Gmail account etc.