A lot changed in 2004
It’s hard to explain to people today, but 20 years ago we did indeed have some big shakeups in consumer tech, and many of those changes have remained in place through today. In the early days of email, most people I knew had an email address through their internet provider. @aol.com or @att.net were very common when I was a kid, and then Hotmail was the new hotness until it started to suck, and Gmail was a breath of fresh air like we’d never experienced before. Yahoo, MSN, AltaVisa, and Ask Jeeves were big in search, but also kinda sucked and were getting destroyed by the new kid on the block: Google.
When you lay them all out there in a row, it really is impressive how much of a hot streak Google was on in the mid-to-late-2000s. Today we know Google as this behemoth company who just wants to put ads in our face everywhere and ruin search with AI responses, but they truly were on an all-timer run back then. They succeeded because they made amazing products that didn’t just match the competition, they made the competition look silly by comparison.
This happens to align when I was really getting into tech and it was exciting to see this fight to be better than anything we’ve seen before. Truth be told, it’s nice to think about when so much of software discussion these days seems to be “yeah, I use the default app, it’s not great but it’s already on my phone.” I love the passion of great software development and fights for market share built on wonderful software, not exploiting platform advantages.
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