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At the time Gmail was introduced, it's hard to overstate how groundbreaking and influential it was. Totally raised the bar for web apps everywhere by making eff
by jcheng 7y ago
At the time Gmail was introduced, it's hard to overstate how groundbreaking and influential it was. Totally raised the bar for web apps everywhere by making effective use of XHR, which at that time was hardly known even to web developers. An absurdly large amount of storage space (1GB when Hotmail was 10MB, IIRC?), fast and effective search. There's a reason Google was the most loved and respected company in tech for years, and IMHO Gmail was a huge part of that.
- peterwwillis 7y agoBut does it really take a coddled genius whose mind runs wild to develop a modern web app and give it lots of storage space? Or was it just a cool idea that a team of regular-old software developers decided to implement?
- jcheng 7y agoLots of teams of regular-old software developers have done cool stuff over the years, but in this case, it happened to be a coddled genius. At least that is the story we've consistently been told over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit I'm pretty sure there were plenty of geniuses on the Hotmail team at the time, too--maybe they weren't being coddled enough in the Ballmer era! ;)