  In this contribution I provide a brief summary of the contents of Gaia DR1.
This is followed by a discussion of studies in the literature that attempt to
characterize the quality of the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution parallaxes in
Gaia DR1, and I point out a misconception about the handling of the known
systematic errors in the Gaia DR1 parallaxes. I highlight some of the more
unexpected uses of the Gaia DR1 data and close with a look ahead at the next
Gaia data releases, with Gaia DR2 coming up in April 2018.
