[mdw]

Yeah they are beyond impressive as far as client-side innovation goes. Google gang are so good it's hard to overestimate. Gears alone is a masterpiece of programming from what I can tell.

gmail for most people catches 99% of spam. Anyone who's tinkered with setting rules and filters and stuff only to be frustrated by leakage should be a convert. Just like gmaps they really showed the rest of the world a better way to do things.

The calendaring is deceptively plain but it's solid. They have an appropriately boring API so that you can really use it as a backend for group-focused applications. I haven't seen the web page thing, but I bet it's easy.

Now one of these days people are gonna appreciate what other genius productions are available for the masses from Amazon.com. S3, EC2, perhaps the payment system that I haven't used yet - these are web-app changing innovations on a scale with some of Google's work. S3 is so simple to use, not only is it the archetypal REST API, but my mom could use it. And EC2 is just genius pure and simple.