Achi news desk-
San Francisco, Calif. —
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved to pull pranks, so much so that they started presenting amazing ideas every April Fool’s Day shortly after starting their company more than a quarter of a century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for the Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company said it plans to introduce a “scrape and sniff” feature on its search engine.
The jokes were so consistently over the top that people learned to laugh them off as another example of Google’s evil. And that’s why Page and Brin decided to unveil something that no one would have believed possible 20 years ago on April Fool’s Day.
It was Gmail, a free service that includes one gigabyte of storage per account, an amount that sounds almost pedestrian in an age of one-terabyte iPhones. But it sounded like an outrageous amount of email capacity at the time, enough to store around 13,500 emails before running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails in the leading webmail services at the time run by Yahoo and Microsoft. That translated to 250 to 500 times more email storage.
Besides the quantum leap in storage, Gmail also came equipped with Google’s search technology so that users could quickly retrieve a tidbit from an old email, photo or other personal information stored on the service. It also automatically tied together a thread of communications about the same topic so that everything flowed together as if it were one conversation.
“The original pitch we came up with was all about the three ‘S’ – storage, search and speed,” said former Google executive Marissa Mayer, who helped design Gmail and the company’s other products before becoming CEO. Yahoo executive later.
It was such a mind-bending concept that shortly after The Associated Press published a story about Gmail late on an April Fool’s afternoon in 2004, readers began calling and emailing to inform the news agency that it had been duped by fraudsters. Google.
“That was part of the charm, making a product that people won’t believe is real. It kind of changed people’s perceptions about the kinds of applications that were possible within a web browser,” former Google engineer Paul Buchheit recalled during a recent AP interview about his efforts to build Gmail.
It took three years to make as part of a project called “Caribou” – a reference to a running gag in the Dilbert comic strip. “There was something kind of absurd about the name Caribou, it made me laugh,” said Buchheit, the 23rd employee to be hired at a company that now employs more than 180,000 people.
The AP knew Google wasn’t joking about Gmail because an AP reporter was suddenly asked to come down from San Francisco to the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to see something that would make the trip worthwhile.
After arriving at a still-developing corporate campus that would soon blossom into the so-called “Googleplex,” the AP reporter was ushered into a small office where Page wore an impish smile as he sat in front of his laptop .
Page, then 31, went on to show off a beautifully designed Gmail inbox and demonstrated how quickly it operated within Microsoft’s now-retired web browser. And he pointed out that a delete button wasn’t included in the main control window because it wouldn’t be necessary, given that Gmail has so much storage and is so easily searchable. “I think people are really going to like this,” Page predicted.
As with so many other things, Page was right. Gmail now has an estimated 1.8 billion active accounts – each now offering 15 gigabytes of free storage bundled with Google Photos and Google Drive. While that’s 15 times more storage than Gmail originally offered, it’s still not enough for many users who rarely see the need to clean up their accounts, just as Google hoped.
The digital hoarding of email, photos and other content is why Google, Apple and other companies now make money from selling extra storage capacity in their data centers. (In Google’s case, it charges anywhere from US$30 per year for 200 gigabytes of storage to US$250 per year for 5 terabytes of storage). The existence of Gmail is also why other free email services and the internal email accounts that employees use on their jobs offer much more storage than was thought 20 years ago.
“We were trying to change the way people had been thinking because people had been working in this model of storage scarcity for so long that deletion had become the default action,” Buchheit said.
Gmail was a game changer in many other ways while becoming the first building block in the expansion of Google’s internet empire beyond its dominant search engine.
After Gmail came Google Maps and Google Docs with word processing and spreadsheet programs. Then came the acquisition of the YouTube video site, followed by the introduction of the Chrome browser and the Android operating system that powers most of the world’s smartphones. With Gmail’s specific intent to scan email content to gain a better understanding of user interests, Google also left little doubt that digital surveillance while trying to sell more ads would be part of its growing ambitions.
Although it created an immediate buzz, Gmail started with limited scope because Google only had enough computing power to support a small audience of users.
“When we launched, we only had 300 machines and they were very old machines that nobody else wanted,” Buchheit said, with a laugh. “We only had enough capacity for 10,000 users, which is a bit ridiculous.”
But that scarcity created a unique aura around Gmail that fueled the fervent demand for tough sign-up invites. Invitations to open a Gmail account were once selling for US$250 each on eBay. “It became a little bit like a social currency, where people would go, ‘Hey, I got a Gmail invite, you want one?'” Buchheit said.
Although signing up for Gmail has become increasingly easier as more of Google’s network of massive data centers come online, the company didn’t start accepting all comers to the email service until it opened the floodgates as a gift Valentine’s Day to the world in 2007.
A few weeks later on April Fool’s Day in 2007, Google would announce a new feature called “Gmail Paper” offering users the chance to have Google print their email archive on “94% organic soybean sputum post- user” and then send it to them via the US Postal Service. Google was joking around that time
