10 Years of Gmail: Being Serious on April Fool's Day

Gmail birthdayThere was the time when a rumor about Google to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before it was launched. But the idea of the search giant doing email was still startling, and the alleged storage capacity of 1GB - 500 times what Microsoft’s Hotmail offered - seemed to be a joke. Especially when Google issued the date of the release to be on April 1st. A lot of people briefly took it to be a really good hoax.

Google has a long history of elaborate April Fools' Day pranks. But its April 1st 2004 announcement was centered around a very real product: Gmail. And the company's webmail service was certainly not a joke. Right from the very beginning, Google took every opportunity to set itself apart from the competition. With a gigabyte of storage space, most people would never need to worry about having their inbox full again.

"It was a pretty big moment for the internet," says Georges Harik, who was responsible for most of Google’s new products when Gmail was born.

In August 2003, Gmail had only the most rudimentary of front ends. The company didn’t yet offer an array of services: Other than the company's search engine, one of the few others like Google News, which had debuted in 2002. But search and News were both websites. Gmail was going to be a web app.

"It was a fundamentally different kind of product," said Kevin Fox from Google. "Fortunately, they gave me lots of latitude to explore different design directions." Fox aimed for something that took both websites and desktop applications advantages without mimicking either. After several major passes on the design, he settled on the look that's still very much recognizable in today's version of Gmail.

A Single Login to Beat Competitors

Gmail debuted as an invitation-only product. It took three years for the service to finally went no-invites-required in February 2007. And when people started to use the service, they were going for a surprise: an Ajax driven interface that is fast and elegant with a robust spam filters. And if concerning about it's massive storage, Google was even confident to eliminate the "delete" button.

By using Ajax, users are allowed to browse around the interface without having to reload the web page. Ajax made Gmail more akin to a desktop application. Most websites at that time were still lacked of any sort of dynamic interactivity, and that included its major competitors. Gmail was one of the services that took Ajax to mainstream.

Since then, Gmail has grown into a web app that packed a lot of features. Gmail's first product manager, a fresh graduate Brian Rakowski, learned about the service from his boss, Marissa Mayer, on his first day at Google in 2002. "It didn’t look anything like what Gmail does now or even what it looked like when it launched," he said.

When the service finally went no-invites and opened to everyone, its user base quickly grew to tens of millions. And in 2014, Gmail has around half a billion users. The service has also grown into a full-fledged platform. There’s a contact manager and fully integrated text, video and SMS chat. Users can plug in widgets that help manage tasks, set reminders and do other certain things. Google has built up an entire suite of office applications and services that run in the browser with Gmail as the hub.

Gmail as an Expanded Focus

Paul Buchheit, Gmail's creator, began his work in August 2001. He was Google's 23rd employee when he joined the company in 1999. It was Buchheit who worked around HTML's limitations by using highly interactive AJAX code. But when Gmail was pioneering the technique, he wasn't clear that it was going to work.

"I had started to make an email program before in, probably, 1996," he explains. "I had this idea I wanted to build web-based email. I worked on it for a couple of weeks and then got bored. One of the lessons I learned from that was just in terms of my own psychology, that it was important that I always have a working product. The first thing I do on day one is build something useful, then just keep improving it."

The first useful thing Buchheit built was a search engine for his own email. The email search engine that first ran on the server on his own desk took only a day to accomplish. His previous project had been Google Groups, which indexed the internet's venerable Usenet discussion groups.

Gmail, which was originally code-named Caribou, with search feature, was far better than anything offered by the major email services at that time.

In its early years, Google had an obvious and obsessive focus on its search engine. This differentiate itself from Yahoo! and other search pioneers that had recast themselves as "portals," expanding their ambitions to encompass everything from weather to sports and games to email. Portals had a reputation for doing many things, but that does not always translate to doing everything well. Google eventually did the same thing and went over and beyond its initial focus. Some saw this as a mistake.

"A lot of people thought it was a very bad idea, from both a product and a strategic standpoint," says Buchheit of his email project. “The concern was this didn’t have anything to do with web search. Some were also concerned that this would cause other companies such as Microsoft to kill us.” Fortunately, the doubters didn’t include Google's founders. "Larry Page and Sergey Brin were always supportive," Buchheit says. "A lot of other people were much less supportive."

April Fool for Telling the Truth

For much of its development time, Gmail had been a secret project, kept away from most people even within Google. "It wasn’t even guaranteed to launch - we said that it has to reach a bar before it’s something we want to get out there," said Kevin Fox.

By early 2004, Gmail worked as planned, and almost everybody inside the company were using it to access Google's internal email system. It was time to settle on a schedule for a public announcement.

April the 1st wasn't just another random day on the calendar. Google had begun its tradition of April Fools' pranks in 2000. And in 2004, the company had a hoax in the works involving a new research center on the moon. And after figuring out that announcing Gmail with its features at the same time would lead some people to speculate that the announcement was a prank, the date was decided.

"Sergey was most excited about it," says Brian Rakowski. "The ultimate April Fools' joke was to launch something kind of crazy on April 1st and have it still exist on April 2nd."

But in the backend, Google itself didn't have the server capacity to give millions of people reliable email and a gigabyte of space apiece. People in the company were working around the clock to meet the deadline but couldn't get that much resources in that small amount of time. Finally, Google ended up with running Gmail on three hundred old Pentium III computers that nobody else at Google wanted. That was sufficient for the limited beta rollout the company planned.

And when people realized that Gmail wasn't a prank, people are rushing to sign in. Buchheit explained the situation: "I think Gmail could have grown a lot more in the first year if we’d had more resources."

A Decade Later

One thing that is obvious about Gmail: its creators built it to last. Despite Gmail had added features more or less continuously and gone through some significant redesigns - is still Gmail.

"I can’t think of another app that has existed so close to its original form for 10 years," said Kevin Fox. "Someone who had only used Gmail in its first iteration and suddenly used it today would still understand Gmail. They'd know how to use it for virtually everything they'd want to do."

And now the big idea Gmail has popularized: cloud-based services, a service delivered over the network, flexible mass storage, instant access from anywhere. The idea of storing data on a server and accessing it over the internet is older than most people think. But Gmail put all the key concepts of cloud computing into a consumer product that ran inside the web browser and behaved like a regular computer program. The idea is that users could run Gmail at their desk at the office, and when they got home, they can launch it on the desktop using a different browser, on a different operating system, and have it look and behave exactly the same without any spacial software required. This was a totally new concept to almost everyone who used it. And with just a simple login, they can use the service for free.

Although all of these concepts - web applications, machine-targeted ads, cloud storage - are common phrases when we are talking about today's modern technology, Gmail was the one who orbited them.