Anil Dash: It feels like 2004 again.

A generation ago, those of us in tech might talk to our friends or family and hear them say, "I think the ads in my Hotmail account are terrible, and I can’t send any attachments. And Yahoo search is getting worse, plus Mapquest is so slow. Plus, I need to get all my friends off of AOL, and I don’t even know what anyone is doing on Friendster anymore. And I can’t deal with all the popup ads on Internet Explorer.."

It’s hard to explain to people today, but 20 years ago we did indeed have some big shakeups in consumer tech, and many of those changes have remained in place through today. In the early days of email, most people I knew had an email address through their internet provider. @aol.com or @att.net were very common when I was a kid, and then Hotmail was the new hotness until it started to suck, and Gmail was a breath of fresh air like we’d never experienced before. Yahoo, MSN, AltaVisa, and Ask Jeeves were big in search, but also kinda sucked and were getting destroyed by the new kid on the block: Google.

And yeah, Mapquest was stodgy while Google Maps transformed what we expected from mapping software.

And IE sucked, Firefox was the cool alternative for a while, and then Google Chrome came in and raised the bar once again.

Wait, is this actually a post about Google?

When you lay them all out there in a row, it really is impressive how much of a hot streak Google was on in the mid-to-late-2000s. Today we know Google as this behemoth company who just wants to put ads in our face everywhere and ruin search with AI responses, but they truly were on an all-timer run back then. They succeeded because they made amazing products that didn’t just match the competition, they made the competition look silly by comparison.

This happens to align when I was really getting into tech and it was exciting to see this fight to be better than anything we’ve seen before. Truth be told, it’s nice to think about when so much of software discussion these days seems to be “yeah, I use the default app, it’s not great but it’s already on my phone.” I love the passion of great software development and fights for market share built on wonderful software, not exploiting platform advantages.

It wasn’t perfect back then, and there are surely some rose-tinted glasses going on here, but I do think things were different back then and it’s undeniable that this era colors how I feel about software today. And while it is different today, I also agree with Dash that in some ways it does feel a bit like it did back then — incumbents are feeling old and stodgy, enshitification reigns supreme (including in some of the items listed above that were so exciting in 2004), and it feels like change is in the air. We’ll see how the next few years go, but I wouldn’t bet on everything staying the same.