Gmail/ShutterStock
When Google launched Gmail on April 1, 2004, it left technology journalists at the time (including this writer) in a quandary: the company had already been known for its April Fool's pranks since 2000, so it was unclear whether it was actually going to launch a mail service with a then-scandalous volume of 1 gigabyte. But it was the sense of humor of Sergey Brin, one of the founding duo: an April Fool's prank that is not a prank at all, and the service will be on the air on April 2 as well, and so it was. (Google, by the way, already had an April Fool's prank ready besides Gmail - that they are hiring for a new development center...on the moon).
Gmail was a groundbreaking service in several ways: First, it was the first product that Google launched after the search engine that became synonymous with web search. Second, it revolutionized the field of e-mail - not only did it offer a relatively dizzying amount of storage for those days (about a hundred times larger than any other service that existed up to that time), it was the first online mail service built as a service, rather than a website.
While competing mail services such as Hotmail, which ruled the roost at the time, or Yahoo were basically websites and written in HTML, Gmail was written in Java and AJAX, which gave it better responsiveness, instead of every action requiring reloading the web page, which led to clumsiness Long and slow. In general, mail services at that time were not designed at all as online services, and accessing them from the browser was a kind of add-on, and not the default as it is today. Back then there was still heavy use of mail programs, such as Outlook and others that pulled e-mail directly from the server. Gmail, unlike the other services, was built from day one as a browser-based service, from the foundation to the tiniest touches. Other matters of innovation were the sophisticated search capability built into the service alongside the revolutionary idea of scanning emails to match advertisements, but we'll get to those later.
It was the first product that Google launched after the search engine that became synonymous with web search/ShutterStock
Project Caribou
Gmail is the brainchild of a Google engineer named Paul Buchheit, and started as a failed side development project of his that started back in 1996, even before he joined Google in 1999 as employee number 23 of the company. The prevailing story is that Gmail was developed under Google's famous 80/20 approach, which allows its employees to work 20 percent of their time on personal projects, but Buchheit, in an interview with Time magazine in 2014, refuted this claim: "It There was an official assignment. I was supposed to build a postal service."
The first thing Buchheit built for Gmail was a search feature, which was already better than anything offered by any other mail service at the time. Search wasn't something anyone thought about when all you had were a few megabytes of storage. But the chicken and the egg: the sophisticated search capability that Bochheit built really required a large storage volume, which also led to a change in attitude and philosophy regarding e-mail: when you have a large storage volume, you don't have to constantly delete emails. The first server, by the way, was simply his desktop computer.
Incidentally, this led to another internal discussion at Google regarding the new product: how much free storage volume to give? The large volume of one gigabyte (one thousand megabytes) was decided after considering more modest options, such as one hundred megabytes, which was still generous compared to any other postal service in those days, but not so outrageous that people thought it was a hoax.
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After a month or two of working on the new project (codenamed Caribou, which was a mysterious commercial project hidden from the comic book hero Dilbert), Buchheit was joined by another engineer, Sanjeev Singh, who was also a partner in the company they founded after leaving Google a few years later so. The team grew over time, but not hysterically - eventually only a dozen engineers worked on the project.
In August 2003, less than a year before launch, Gmail still only had a crude front-end interface. To design the interface of the service that currently serves about one-seventh of the world's population, Kevin Fox, another recent recruit of the company, was brought in. Fox knew that the interface should be Googley, but in those days, there was no uniformity and understanding of what Googley actually was. The only example that Fox could have been inspired by was Google News, but Google News was with a website and not a service or application like Gmail was designed to be. Fox decided that it combines a website interface with a native software interface, without blindly imitating either. After three versions, the design that everyone knows today as the Gmail design was born.
Three hundred old Pentiums
Gmail's business model has also been the subject of debate within the company. While some argued that the service should be paid for, Buchheit insisted that the service be ad-based, but free and accessible to all. The innovation was that Google scanned the user's messages to give them personalized ads, instead of bombarding them with banners like other services. For example, details of ticket offices were displayed next to a "conversation" (that's what the email sequences were called in Gmail) talking about the "Beach Boys", for example. This was the point where our privacy became a commodity, and Gmail product manager Rakowski began thinking in terms of "how much each user is worth."
At the beginning of 2004, most of the company's employees were already using Gmail internally and it was time to go public. The problem was that to provide the storage volumes, a volume of servers was needed that was not within the reach of Google. The solution was to limit the initial amount of external users, and in retrospect, this turned out to be a brilliant marketing ploy.
In the end, the initial server infrastructure built for Gmail was three hundred old Pentium 3 computers that no one at the company wanted. They were enough as an initial infrastructure to support the first thousand external users, and for each of them to invite a few friends to the new service.
The year: 2007, and Google explains why to switch to Gmail
This trick, which was born as a technical necessity, became a strong marketing point: orders to Gmail became a sought-after thing precisely because of the lack of availability, to the point that the order was sold for over 150 dollars. The user limit created a crazy fear of missing out among those in the know, and the Gmail address became a status symbol for tech geeks, at least in the first days of launch.
But not everything was rosy: the precedent marketing techniques that included scanning emails, caused Google the wrath of privacy bodies. Some believed it was a privacy violation of the sender of the email, some said it was a privacy violation of the recipient, including possible scenarios of "inappropriate advertising", were a repeated refrain in relation to the new service. And even then, and rightly so, the question arose: what does Google do with all this information, and how does it save it?
On April 6, 31 privacy groups signed an open letter to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, raising a series of concerns about Gmail. They called Gmail a "bad precedent" and asked that the service be suspended until their concerns are addressed. Google, like Google, tried to dispel the concerns by detailing the storage policy, and with the help of public relations that emphasized journalistic articles that supported its position, this alongside canceling the opponents, such as privacy activists, journalists and legislators who came out against the service without trying it themselves, Google claimed at the time.
The year: 2010, and Google allows you to extract voice calls from Gmail
After all: our passport to the Internet
Let's go back to the present: 20 years after its launch, the way forward is unclear. While social networks, instant messaging services and video calls are also competing for our attention, the place of the old email is not as central as it used to be. Add to that the unwritten blow of junk mail (spam) that floods our boxes and nobody deletes anything - the ability to use electronic mail as an effective means of communication and not a big textual garbage can, has become challenging. Managing our emails became the main problem, and answering emails became a chore.
On the other hand, Google does not go on adventures with the service, which is expected to be reliable and always available, and is the largest e-mail service in the world. Less for interpersonal communication, our e-mail today is used by us to enter services and reset passwords, to track packages, to store cards and certificates, and more. This is our digital archive, and our passport to the Internet. This current usage has not gone unnoticed by Google.
"We certainly recognize that Gmail is almost like a digital identity," Google's Vice President of Gmail Ilya Brown tells The Verge, "It's your representation to the outside world. How do we help that identity evolve with users over time? We don't have There is still a solution for this, but we are giving it some thought," concludes Brown.
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