Thursday, April 1, 2004 Gmail was officially launched. Google was first known for their search
bar that I am sure that everyone uses at least once a day. Now, they had ventured into the email sector of the internet. There was some scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service that would have the storage capacity of 1 GB. Which was 500 times the amount that Microsoft’s Hotmail was currently offering. Everybody thought that Google was pulling this stunt as an actual joke, because of the fact that they were releasing this new launch on April fools day. Little did they know that Google was very serious about this launch and they had big plans of success and those plans were very much carried out. Gmail is one of the most liked and most used email service providers that is used globally, having more than 1.8 billion users. Within the webmail industry, Gmail accounts for 89.6% of account holders.
I think that this was a good tactic because they had caught their competition and their customers off guard. Turned out that Gmail was real and revolutionary at that. Still to this day Gmail has taken over the customers from Hotmail and Yahoo mail because of their large capacity and capabilities of their software. It was almost like customers and competition did a double take when Google first announced this news because of the significance of the date that they chose to release this. The competition took little to no action on the announcement because they did not believe it was real.
Overall, Google has created a mind-blowing email service and it all started by people believing that it was not even true.
BoweryJE22
This was a really interesting read! Not only has google created a monopoly-like market with email, but their search engine service also blows most other search engines out of the water. This is why it will interesting to see how Amazon competes with them in the next decades. Several of my friends from other colleges spoke with Amazon representatives as they discussed plans to extend their current capacities to provide search engines as well. In any event, google did spearhead the way to make email and internet use the most accessible despite a lot of initial doubt. Great read!
I find that very interesting and very wild for them to have released this on that specific day. It is also very smart because I guess it shows who really wanted to be ready to use the available resources of Google. I would have, however, have been just as skeptical of this being true just because of it being released on April 1.