What is the point in releasing your code as GPL anyway? If you've solved some interesting problem, then people can read your code to figure it out and then reimplement it, and no one will ever find out.
> 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.