In Depth: How Google rescued us from a life of Hotmail

In 2004, anyone with 2MB of online storage thought they were pretty hot stuff - so when Google announced a free web-based email service with a staggering 1 gigabyte of storage, everybody looked at the date - April 1 - and figured it was an April Fool joke.Some joke. Today, Gmail is the world's favourite email system - it blasted past the previous winner, Hotmail, in 2012 - and it continues to offer the familiar combination of a fairly horrible interface* and massive amounts of free storage. That amount is currently 15GB shared across all your Google services.It also changed the way we think about communications. Email became something you could search effortlessly, and the huge storage space meant the end of tedious email mailbox management. Download Google Chrome and use our 20 best Chrome extensionsGmail introduced us to the conversational view of email that dominates email software and services today, made mobile email apps before anyone had heard of an iPhone, and with its recent introduction of a separate tab for promotions it's arguably killed off the email newsletter as an effective marketing tool.More than anything, though, it encouraged everyone to embrace the cloud.How Gmail got it rightGmail wasn't the first cloud service. It wasn't even the first cloud-based email service: webmail had been kicking around since the early nineties and was popularised by Hotmail, which launched in 1996. But what Gmail did was better, and that was partly because of the technology that underpinned it. Where other services were generally built around HTML, the language used for writing static web pages (and the reason for the wacky capitalisation of the original Hotmail), Gmail used the programming language Javascript in what would come to be known as Ajax. Ajax - it's short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - enabled designers and developers do to more than just make static pages: they could make applications that ran inside the browser, applications that looked and felt like desktop software. Gmail and the following year's Google Maps showed just how powerful that could be. The launch was a masterstroke too. Rather than just launch the product - and suffer the inevitable capacity disasters that a high-profile launch would inevitably cause - Google took more of a Willy Wonka strategy. Gmail was launched as an invite-only service, a move that gave the early adopters bragging rights and that made Gmail seem impossibly exciting. The invitations were the hot tickets of 2004, selling on eBay for silly money, and the service remained invitation-only until 2007.The launch wasn't the only thing Google got right. Gmail became one of the longest-running beta releases of all time, only officially becoming a finished product in 2009. That meant the service spent five years labelled as a work in progress, with Google adding and removing features as it saw fit. The beta label meant that any criticism of the service seemed churlish: it's free, it's a beta, and you're complaining? 12 net technologies that shaped the decadeWhat Gmail did with email, Google Docs did with everything else: the apps ran in your browser, were good enough for many people, and didn't cost a penny at a time when Office suites still cost hundreds of pounds. And like Gmail, they were very, very fast. Today we're used to nippy web and mobile app experiences, but back then web-based software either required hefty downloads or ran painfully slowly. Google changed all that.What, us worry?The beta label may have deflected some complaints, but that didn't stop some users from grumbling - especially over outages. Gmail's exceptional reliability and astonishing scale meant that on the rare occasions it did go down, the whole world noticed. The worst happened in September 2013, affecting nearly half of Gmail's global users. That's hundreds of millions of people: when Google's various services suffered blackouts the month before, global internet traffic dropped by nearly 40%.There were more serious complaints too. The ill-fated launch of Google Buzz, the precursor to Google+, outraged many when their Gmail address books became public contact lists, and there have been ongoing concerns over privacy because Gmail scans the content of your emails to better target advertising. The most recent such concern was in August 2013, during the height of the NSA spying allegations, when Google's lawyers wrote that "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy" when using the service - a phrase that was quickly seized on by Google's critics. Their worries were unfounded: the phrase simply meant that anybody who sent emails *to* Gmail should expect Google's software to process those messages.A new GoogleViewed from today, it's clear that Gmail was the beginning of a new Google, the Google we have now. Before Gmail, Google was reactive and fairly impersonal: it couldn't help you until you typed search terms into its little search box, and its knowledge of you was limited to what you used it to search for. With Gmail, Google began to paint a better picture - a picture that it's since fleshed out even more with data from Drive and Play, Maps and News, Calendar and YouTube, Picasa and Google+. It's a picture of you: what you do and view, what you say and listen to, where you go and when you're going.That picture has improved Google in two crucial ways. It's enabled Google to better answer your questions, in some cases before you even knew you had questions, and it's enabled Google to better target its advertising, which is of course what ultimately pays for all the free stuff, Android and moonshots. Without Gmail we'd no doubt still be Googling - but we might not be Google anything else-ing.* On the web, at least. The Android version looks great.Now why not check out Best browser 2014: which should you be using?

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