Google indexes every invoice you get. If you use gmail they know exactly what you order at which store.

That feature did not exist until Inbox, years later.

I still feel like I've been kicked in the groin every time I open Gmail and it isn't Inbox.

Bastards!

I suppose I'm probably a fool to continue expecting that they'll eventually get around to bringing Inbox's bundles over to Gmail, like they said they were going to.

How would you be able to tell if it existed earlier? Anyway the point is it exists now.

Because I personally (with many collaborators, of course) wrote that feature.

Thanks for highlighting the truth. There’s far too much FUD in the comments section these days, especially with respect to FAANG companies I’ve noticed in recent months.

Or it's there for both of those reasons... Not an either or situation

You can make up as many fictional backstories as you want, but gmail was launched because signed-in users enjoy vastly better search quality and prior to gmail there was no reason to associate your identity with Google.

You don't need to be signed-in to track someone with a cookie and provide targeted search results.

You do to be tracked consistently across different devices and browsers.

From the outside, it looked like GDocs, GMail, and crew were originally created for internal use because engineering Googlers used Linux and hated Windows. Microsoft was still quite the enemy in teh early 00's after all. Along the way a few someones figured out that they could offer it as a product outside the company as a means to attack Microsoft more broadly.

Is that view incorrect?

Google Docs was acquired, so I don't think so. You might be right about Calendar, because there is nothing in the world that a Googler or anyone else hates more than Oracle Calendar.

My overarching view on Google's evolution is that their real product is dirt-cheap computing facilities, and their products are often just a way to exploit that capacity. Part of Gmail's genesis was an abundance of underutilized hard drives. YouTube was acquired because they already had the networking in place to operate it. Inbox Smart Reply was a way to use a novel and cheap ML inference device to launch a feature that nobody else could afford. In all these cases the infrastructure existed first and the products emerged to fill them.

Ha! GMail offered the most free space, by an order of magnitude over its competitors, and that's the primary reason it succeeded in drawing users initially.

Email search wasn't the draw initially, and wasn't even all that much better; there was serious controversy over search, years later, as it was tied to ads that reflected the content of private communications.

Hotmail, Yahoo et al had reasonably good search for the time, but stiflingly little free space. Google offered far more free space with IMAP and POP3 access.

Your argument is about why users moved to gmail. jeffbee is saying Google created GMail to have users signed in so that they could give better search results through personalization.