I live in Russia and I remember when most people used Rambler as a search engine (I’m not sure if my memory deceives me, but it maybe even was the default in IE after install), and also Yandex.

I was really enthusiastic when Google came to the Russian-speaking Web as a search engine, and also when they rolled out a browser of their own (I was still using Opera, but it was very nice). Google Earth I just loved, simply used it to look at various parts of the world for the process itself, ha-ha.

There was something about the general spirit of Google, with them supporting XMPP and RSS, and with services like Google Code, and events like GSoC.

I think that this push at looking good and geeky from those years was connected to Sun Microsystems still being alive or just recently dead, and thus having to compete with Sun’s image of a really humanitarian company while also really important for the industry.

No Sun - no need, Apple always was elitist and their “geeky” part was always perceived as fake, Microsoft was always perceived as evil, and in general nobody had the bar as high as Sun’s. So they didn’t have to try that hard to seem the good guys anymore.