How Hotmail changed Microsoft and email
Reading this story I find a correlation between Hotmail and WhatsApp, a simple and free product that introduce to a massive audience a different way of communication (Hotmail = Email, WhatsApp = Messaging).<p>And seeing how Hotmail lost relevance and Gmail take his place few years ago, I'm wondering, is possible now that a massive product like WhatsApp can be replaced with other that do the same thing in the same way? Why Gmail won?, because the 1GB?, UI/UX?, Google marketing? Snapchat is losing to Instagram because Instagram was a established product that start to mimic Snapchat, but a new player that beat WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger? (not in China [1]).<p>Also, is WhatsApp/Messaging taking the place of email for younger audiences, casual chat, non-work related communications? Oh, I have an idea, I will love to have a "email" feature on Signal, move the asynchronous way of communication of email to the messaging apps will be awesome to avoid the attention economy / texting fatigue (and have encrypted email without the PGP complexity!). A nice feature to Signal to differentiate from the competition imo. I'm crazy?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.similarweb.com/blog/popular-messaging-apps-by-country" rel="nofollow">https://www.similarweb.com/blog/popular-messaging-apps-by-co...</a>