> There are plenty of alternative search engines, e-mail services, video hosting sites, mobile operating systems and browsers.
Really? And who knows about all those alternatives?
I realized how big Google was when I was reading a book and the author said "Google <term>, ....", and it took me a second to parse that sentence. At first glance I thought he was saying something about Google corporation, but then I quickly realized he was telling to me look something up on the web. Google is synonymous with web search, and Gmail is probably synonymous with webmail.