http://blog.tooreal.net/articles/gmail/

Back in 2003 when web-based email services were dominated by Hotmail and Yahoo! who offered a paltry 4MB of space for the average ‘free’ user, web-mailing was such a pain I hardly used my Yahoo! account. April 1 2004: Enter Gmail, with a 1GB storage limit, a fresh user-friendly interface with several neat features, and a restricted invite-only beta testing stage that tickled and piqued the curiosity of those that missed out. The cascade has begun.

Today, three years down the road, Gmail has become a phenomenon. While I lack the numbers indicating the present market share, it seems to me that many people have switched over from Yahoo! and Hotmail to Gmail. I know I did. What made this cascade possible?

In class, it was mentioned that for a cascade to take place, the value of the new technology has to outweigh that of the previous technology. With other webmail services having a good ten years under their belt, it seemed impossible for Gmail to have any success in squeezing into the webmail market and uprooting the already entrenched services. However, with new exciting features, a ‘cool’ interface, and some commendable marketing, Gmail has forced its own cascade. 1GB of storage space left Yahoo! and Hotmail’s 4MB and 2MB offerings looking laughable, and the latter two quickly moved to offer an improved capacity in their webmail services. Grouping messages into tags is another ingenious feature that made navigating through those endless chain of emails a breeze. And the user friendly, and ‘cool’ interface (done in AJAX) just made the novelty of switching over really worth it — it looked great and navigating felt good. And the marketing strategy of keeping it restricted to an invite-only group of individuals just capped it off and made the exclusivity of this new webmail service another huge plus to its overall value. All these features made Gmail’s value soar spectacularly above that of Yahoo! and Hotmail, and it was no surprise that the cascade took off.