The 90s had competition here. There was MSN, FirstClass, Internet, Compuserve, AOL. The Internet won, but no it's not as simple as "we already had email". It didn't start out unified.

I'm talking about for the consumer. Sure, the Internet sure had a leg up on winning, in retrospect, because it was open and built by schools too. But imagine if Microsoft had successfully pushed MSN as "the" network for high schools?

These competitors were point-and-click easy for nontechies long before the Internet was.

And all those apps want to become E-Mail.