Once thought to be an April Fool’s prank by Google, Gmail marks 20 years
Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved pulling pranks, so much so they began rolling outlandish ideas every April Fool’s Day not long after starting their company more than a quarter century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for a Copernicus research centre on the moon. Another year, the company said it planned to roll out a “scratch and sniff” feature on its search engine.
The jokes were so consistently overthetop that people learned to laugh them off. And that’s why Mr. Page and Mr. Brin decided to unveil something no one would believe was possible 20 years ago on April Fool’s Day.
‘Too good to be true’
It was Gmail, a free service boasting 1 gigabyte of storage per account, an amount that sounds almost pedestrian in an age of oneterabyte iPhones. But it sounded like a preposterous amount back then, enough to store about 13,500 emails before running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails in the thenleading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft.
Gmail also came equipped with Google’s search technology so users could quickly retrieve a tidbit from an old email
“The original pitch we put together was all about the three ‘S’s” — storage, search and speed,” said former Google executive Marissa Mayer.
It was such a mindbending concept that shortly after The Associated Press published a story about Gmail, readers began calling and emailing to inform the news agency it had been duped by Google’s pranksters.
“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 said.
The knew Google was not joking about Gmail because a reporter had been abruptly asked to come down from San Francisco to the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters to see something that would make the trip worthwhile.
After arriving at a stilldeveloping corporate campus in California that would turn into what became known as the “Googleplex,” the reporter was ushered into a small office to meet Mr. Page who was wearing an impish grin.
APMr. Page, then just 31 years old, proceeded to demonstrate how quickly Gmail operated within Microsoft’s nowretired Explorer web browser. He pointed out there was no delete button featured in the main control window because it would not be necessary, given Gmail had so much storage. “I think people are really going to like this,” Mr. Page predicted.
Accurate prediction
Mr. Page was right. Gmail now has an estimated 1.8 billion active accounts — each one now offering 15 gigabytes of free storage bundled with Google Photos and Google Drive. Even though that’s 15 times more storage than Gmail initially offered, it’s still not enough for many users.
The digital hoarding of email, photos and other content is why Google, Apple and other companies now make money from selling additional storage capacity in their data centres. Gmail’s existence is also why other free email services and the internal email accounts that employees use on their jobs offer far more storage than was fathomed 20 years ago.
Gmail was a game changer in several other ways while becoming the first building block in the expansion of Google’s empire beyond its stilldominant search engine.