This does not invalidate the original argument: This crowd here is representative of who first adopted GMail and spread the word. Without these early adopters,

This does not invalidate the original argument: This crowd here is representative of who first adopted GMail and spread the word. Without these early adopters, the other billion users would likely not have followed suit. I cannot comment on the early years of the search engine since I was about 8 years old at the time, but I find it likely that it was similar back in the day.