The grand old enshittification curve strikes again. Remember, as stated by Cory Doctorow, the process of enshittification entails these steps: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse t…
Before Gmail, my old Hotmail account had a whopping 2MB of storage, and others were similarly small. Gmail was a few GB right from the start, forcing the rest to compete and offer more storage.
Storage, yes, that’s the one thing I’d say GMail improved. Thankfully the rest of the industry was quick to implement the same things.
Otherwise… I mean, it took them a very long time to realize the whole “tag based” email management needed to be, if not removed, at least “hidden” and made to look more folder like. It was a confusing horrible mess, even to many of us who understood it.
I think people have a tendency to look upon whatever the current dominant platform is with rose tinted glasses because they compare what they have now, which has undergone dozens of changes, but as each was incremental they assume it didn’t change the fundamental original, to the prehistoric UIs of Hotmail in the 1990s. In reality, at the time of the introduction of GMail, they were all using roughly the same web technologies, and GMail was the one that looked cruder.
I don’t even like the UI today, but it’s a huge improvement on 2000s GMail.
Before Gmail, my old Hotmail account had a whopping 2MB of storage, and others were similarly small. Gmail was a few GB right from the start, forcing the rest to compete and offer more storage.
Yahoo was something like a whopping 10 or 15MB. Gmail debuting with 1GB of space was a nearly 1000 fold increase at the time.
Storage, yes, that’s the one thing I’d say GMail improved. Thankfully the rest of the industry was quick to implement the same things.
Otherwise… I mean, it took them a very long time to realize the whole “tag based” email management needed to be, if not removed, at least “hidden” and made to look more folder like. It was a confusing horrible mess, even to many of us who understood it.
I think people have a tendency to look upon whatever the current dominant platform is with rose tinted glasses because they compare what they have now, which has undergone dozens of changes, but as each was incremental they assume it didn’t change the fundamental original, to the prehistoric UIs of Hotmail in the 1990s. In reality, at the time of the introduction of GMail, they were all using roughly the same web technologies, and GMail was the one that looked cruder.
I don’t even like the UI today, but it’s a huge improvement on 2000s GMail.