Remember how blown away people were when Gmail launched in 2004?

Google Fiber feels like the same leap of innovation. It's been a long time since we saw anything like this from the search and advertising giant.

Back when Gmail launched, the other free email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail were offering less than 5MB of storage -- that's five megabytes. Google trumped them all with 1GB of free storage. With so much storage, there was no need to trash anything. You could archive it and keep it forever.

Better yet, Gmail's search meant you could easily find any email you wanted, even from years ago. There was no reason to put things into different folders, use flags, or any of the other tricks we used to keep track of mail on other platforms. Threaded conversations, while hated by some, were nonetheless a new and innovative way of keeping track of email chains with multiple parties.

Gmail also paved the way for Google's gradual move into business apps -- most Google enterprise sales still lead with Gmail. Apps is more of a nice but not entirely necessary add-on.

Google Fiber is like Gmail on many levels:

It exposes how slow the incumbents have been to innovate. Google Fiber makes the cable-based ISPs look pathetic. It promises to offer speeds up to 1,000Mbps downstream and upstream, for only $70 a month. That's theoretically fast enough to download a high-definition movie in under a minute, although speeds could still be constrained by bottlenecks on the distribution servers or elsewhere in the network. Comcast's best home package offers 50Mbps downstream and 10Mbps downstream. All Google Fiber customers also get 1TB of free storage. If they buy TV service for an extra $50 a month, Google will throw in a $200 Nexus 7 tablet to be used as a remote control. Google is also giving away -- for free -- a package that offers 5Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Google even thumbed its nose at the incumbents with a slide showing how slowly Internet access speed has been growing compared with compute power and storage (see above) -- which is exactly what one would expect to happen given the lack of competition most broadband ISPs face in most parts of the country.