Does inventing gmail count? Webmail before gmail sucked, now they are essentially clones (or improvements) of gmail.

Many cancer researches use gmail (or other similar webmail) instead of the horrible internal email of the university, with a bad spam filter, small disk quotas, bad browser support (only IE6), etc.

And other researches use gmail (or a similar webmail) too, like to cure tuberculosis, eradicate polio, launch rockets, heart surgery, ...