This quarter Google (Alphabet) has all the reasons to celebrate, shake and blow the champagne bottle, as their quarterly and yearly financial reports for Q4 2015 transformed Google’s parent company in the most valuable company in the world, leaving rival Apple behind for billions of dollars. As the company reported whopping revenue and profit, their usage numbers also got everyone’s attention for the so many billions and billions of users to their services.
The newest member to join the “billion-user-club” is Gmail, which surpassed the mark of one billion active users at the end of last year. During the statement, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai noted that the growth has been fueled by mobile users, and it should since Android has more than one billion users and users have been spending more and more time on their smartphones – indeed, it’s a lot easier to check your e-mail everywhere, on-the-go, and it significantly increases the frequency on which we use the service.
Other notable Google services with over a billion active users are Google search itself, Google Maps, Chrome, Play Store, YouTube and the aforementioned Android, and the entire Google ecosystem of apps and services make Gmail extremely attractive for those looking for productivity, as it integrates with Google Docs, Drive, Photos, Music and all the other services mentioned before, and much more. The recent introduction of Inbox gives a unified experience for the user, doesn’t matter the platform they are in, with deep integration with Google Calendar, Google Keep and others, making Gmail more powerful every day.
The growth of Gmail has been phenomenal since it was launched eleven years ago, in 2004. By that time, Microsoft’s Hotmail was the dominant player in the market, but Google’s service offered disruptive features such as 1GB of storage when Hotmail and others had only 2 to 4 MB. In 2012, Gmail blew Hotmail away and snapped the first place with 425 million users. In May 2015, the service had over 900 million users and it took only a few months for it to surpass the billion-mark. Hotmail, on the other hand, has around 400 million users, while Yahoo is far behind with less than 300 million users, showcasing the true popularity of Gmail compared to other email services these days.