From: Andrew S. Baker [mailto:asbz...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, 23 April 2013 10:13 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Color me skeptical
>>If you're going to say that Google didn't revolutionise search because they >>didn't invent it But they did not create a paradigm shift. Nothing shifted. We still use web mail like we did before, and we still search (largely) like we did before. I think this is where we might disagree. You see Gmail as "web based email" - maybe I can characterise this viewpoint as a looking at it as a technology stack. But if we look at it from a service use-case PoV, i.e. "how do people use this service?" I think it definitely changed the way people (outside tech circles where people were used to almost unlimited amounts of email storage) treated email (whether web based or not) All of a sudden you didn't need to worry about quotas. You needn't need to organise things into folders to manage large amounts of mail. Email became "set and forget" - just read and send email (and do the occasional search). All the other things we used to do with managing mail went out the window. That's what differentiated Gmail from Outlook or Hotmail or Eudora or Pine or anything else at the time: a) No need to organise, because search is both effective and instantaneous b) No need to delete things, because storage is (effectively) limitless So, "large quota web based email" isn't really a paradigm shift. But I think "email as a service" (and Google will take care of everything behind the scenes) is (for small values of "paradigm") Search might be a harder question to tackle. Arguably from a technology PoV, we still type text into a HTML form and hit "submit", so we still search like we did before Google. But the way we search is different now. Alta Vista was arguably the "king of the hill" before Google, but to use that I had to think like Alta Vista, using "arcane" syntax and logical operators to get the results I was looking for. I'm not sure how to describe how I use Google, but what I need to think about before searching for something is completely different to how I had to think to use any of its predecessors. This way of interacting with a computer system to find things was completely different IMHO. Cheers Ken ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
