He says "Gmail was laughable early on". I got a Gmail invitation, through an acquaintance, before it was generally available to the public. I remember how aweso

He says "Gmail was laughable early on". I got a Gmail invitation, through an acquaintance, before it was generally available to the public. I remember how awesome it felt in comparison to Yahoo Mail: (1) file uploads were handled after hitting "Send", instead of disrupting the writing of your message like the other web interfaces did, (2) it came with huge online storage, (3) searching emails actually worked which in combination with the huge storage meant that I stopped deleting emails, (4) spam simply stopped hitting my Inbox (a real problem with my Yahoo Mail account, which made my Y! account unusable), (5) it was the only free email service I knew that provided POP3/SMTP access and then later I noticed (6) conversation threads. Ever since Gmail was invitation-only, it has been awesome on multiple levels. It has its ups and downs, but if I am to think of products that have been almost perfect ever since version 1, Gmail is right up there with iPhone 1 - i.e. missing features, but so useful and refreshing. How can you fail to mention that Internet Explorer, ever since version 6, became the main barrier for adopting web standards, as development on it simply stopped for several years, with the team being sent to work on other things, like Silverlight? How can you fail to mention Firefox for that matter? In 2006 Firefox version 2 was barely released. It then grew to over 20% of market-share, without Mozilla making aggressive deals for prebundling it. Internet Explorer isn't losing to Chrome only, it's losing to Firefox and Safari too and they ended up in this position by their own incompetence or malevolence. There was a time when Microsoft was serving their customer's needs. They stopped doing that in 2001, after Windows XP was released.