Today Google made a blog post celebrating the 15th year anniversary of Gmail:
https://blog.google/products/gmail/hitting-send-on-the-next-15-years-of-gmail/ .
When Gmail was first introduced, it was truly revolutionary. Most other email providers offered a handful of MB of total storage. Webmail interfaces were slow, crowded with ads, and were a mess to use. When Gmail was announced, many thought it was an April Fools joke: who would offer 1 GB of storage when that was 2 magnitudes above what most providers offered?
I think what surprises me the most about Gmail is how completely it has won the email market for the past 15 years. An email service is relatively straightforward to implement: the protocols are all open, there’s open source software that can scale reliably; and yet Gmail is the undisputed king of email. Even many corporations use Gmail through G Suite.
Now that Gmail has essentially won the email market, it looks like it is slowly pivoting to become an application delivery platform in itself. Just like how the web pivoted from delivering simple HTML pages to full Single Page Applications (SPA): games, word processors, custom applications – Gmail is doing the same thing. If you look at the original blog post, Google is introducing many new actions with email: reply to a comment post, browsing hotel recommendations, and generally interact with other web sites and services. Gmail will slowly turn into a one-stop shop for all your messaging needs – it’s not too hard to imagine Gmail being able to add items to your todo list, to create posts to be sent to your blog to post, to send texts to friends, etc.
Here’s to another 15 years of Gmail transforming our lives. Thanks for everything.