> Google also "gave away" their Gmail service for a long time, destroying the many mail services that ISPs and others were doing as part of their offered servic

> Google also "gave away" their Gmail service for a long time, destroying the many mail services that ISPs and others were doing as part of their offered services. Back in 2000, I signed up for several web based email services including excite, yahoo, hotmail, and a few others I can't remember. This was well before gmail and none of them required me to have an invite to even sign up like gmail did. Other than hotmail, and yahoo, none of them are still around today despite the fact that they were giving away email services like gmail did a few years later.