Each mistake is a lesson. – Morihei Ueshiba
Gmail wasn’t created because Google’s 20 per cent time was legendary. Paul Buchheit began working on Gmail in 1996, as a personal project. Paul was dissatisfied for some time with email. It was the days before Hotmail. He would have to return to his room to check it. Buchheit remarked, “That was stupid.” He thought, “That’s so stupid.” Buchheit wasn’t sure of his intentions and had no idea where the random project he started was heading. He became bored and, despite his interest in emailing, the service was never developed.
Buchheit, the 23rd Google employee, joined in 1999. Larry Page asked Buchheit to create a product for email personalisation in 2001. Larry Page & Sergey Brin only said that they thought this was an interesting field, and Buchheit could run with the idea. Google’s founders did not give any specific directions or instructions.
Email was still a crude desktop application that wasn’t much improved since its conception. Webmail storage and interfaces were incredibly slow. Hotmail only offered users 2MB, while Yahoo provided a little more than 4MB.
Google Groups was Buchheit’s very first project at Google. Groups purchased Usenet in 2001. Its database included newsfeeds as well as articles, messages, discussions, and discussion threads. Usenet was one of the earliest computer networks in wide use. Its archives date back to 1980. Google Groups indexed essentially all Usenet content. Buchheit already knew the Group code and so he used it to search his email rather than Usenet. Gmail, an email search engine was developed in one day. Buchheit initially operated his email-search engine from a server on his desk. The search engine only looked at Buchheit’s emails. The search was very useful, even then, for the other Google engineers. They had a large number of emails in common with Paul. Google’s workplace culture was based heavily on emails at the time. Buchheit got 500 emails every day. Email search was in demand. Buchheit’s own colleagues requested the feature to search their email. Buchheit introduced several new features to Gmail that have been copied by many other email clients. In 2004, a 1GB storage space was considered a large amount compared to other email clients that offered 2-4 MB.
Autocomplete was introduced by Gmail as the first web-based email provider. Auto-complete was a great way to save people from having to remember email addresses. Users could archive their emails rather than delete them. Buchheit discovered users were deleting emails to either save space or organise inboxes which would otherwise become unmanageable. Gmail’s search feature and 1GB of storage made it easy to solve these problems. No need to delete any emails.
Googlers were inundated with email. Internal users would receive an email and four people would respond at the same time. The mess was bad. The email had to be organized intensively by people, who tried to connect the multiple threads. Gmail introduced conversations, which displayed emails in a ‘chat-like’ manner. The team decided that quoted text would be hidden so that readers don’t see the same content over and over again.
Gmail evolved organically as a result of a team dedicated to solving problems that they or early users had. The team spent time researching the root causes of any problems that users would report. Gmail was still a newcomer to the Google world. Google was obsessively focused on search at that time. The reason why it was able to defeat competitors such as Yahoo and Lycos is because of its focus on search. Gmail was not launched commercially immediately. Gmail wasn’t always a popular project in the workplace. Google’s reaction to the Gmail project was odd and controversial. Both from a strategic and product perspective, people were worried. Gmail was not related to web search and some detractors believed that it would lead Microsoft to take on Google. Page and Brin continued to support the project.
Gmail was launched on the 1st of April 2004. Gmail was launched on 1 April 2004. Google was known to prank its users every April Fool’s Day, and the massive storage space provided by Google was unheard of. Brian Rakowski was the first Gmail product manager to say that if people aren’t able to tell whether you’re kidding, you’ve innovated.
The demand for Gmail accounts increased once people realised it was a genuine service. Google, however, did not possess enough server capacity to accommodate everyone and was only able to offer accounts on an invitation basis. Gmail was given a reputation of exclusivity by Google’s limited rollout. eBay users even bid $150 to get a Gmail.
Google announced Gmail users numbered 1.4 Billion in April 2018. One in five people on the planet uses Gmail.
