Web brands, e-mail, and their centerpiece services

As an anonymouse reply to a thread

For many things, e-mail is now one of those infrastructure/utility things that is now one of many that complements a different centerpiece service, such as music video delivery and stuff.

My case:
For Yahoo, it used to be GeoCities (remember, that GeoCities offered their own e-mail address, too), and they migrated their GeoCities userbase over. E-mail was then a useful add-on to the Yahoo portal and search. For a time, Yahoo's e-mail was great, until spam overwhelmed everyone.

Yahoo later bought Launch, and became the first large-scale music video delivery service—with ads and all, and the difficult ways to get Windows Media Player to play for sure on Mozilla and then Firefox 1.0. But Launch.com was the property that made Yahoo great. Until they began putting ads between each music video, which was horrid.

(Yahoo later bought flickr and tumblr, and while these have added value, then Yahoo has had a haphazard time getting to monetise those two.)

After Google bought YouTube, which quickly became the primary music video delivery service (along with Vevo), the Yahoo Launch site lost relevance. Maybe only die-hards swear by it. While Flash at the time was way more resource-intensive than a plug-in, then Flash was available for Mac and Linux, and arguably cross-platform on the desktop, thus managing to play videos without a hitch (YMMV). Using Flash from the outset made YouTube great. YouTube is now the centerpiece of all of Google's web properties.

A similar service to YouTube was msn video, but it was a pioneer vaguely similar to Launch; while msn video had plenty of user-created videos, I don't recall it ever having music videos.

* For Google, the centerpiece is YouTube. E-mail is still great, and many people also use Google Docs, and some even Google+. Android complements and extends the whole bunch.
* For Microsoft, it's probably a combo of Office Online, OneDrive, Skype on the web and a few other tidbits.
* For Yahoo, the centerpiece services are news, flickr, and tumblr (in no particular order).
* Apple could be best described as a non-service. It does offer services all right, but none of them has killer web features compared to above players.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft did social networking, and for a time, both were reasonably good, but seemed to have been shuttered after Facebook became a thing.