Looking at the impending makeover of Hotmail , I have to say I'm impressed. Recalling reasons why many of us switched to GMail (away from Yahoo Mail, natch) - it wasn't about brand, or thinking Google was cooler. It was a great product with soft innovations that just made web-based email much easier to use. And yes, it took the other guys a long time to catch up on the storage issue, which gave Google a nice head start.