(San Francisco) Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin love playing pranks, so much so that they started coming up with crazy ideas every April Fool’s Day, shortly after starting their company there. more than a quarter of a century ago.
One year, Google posted a job posting for a Copernicus research center on the Moon. Another year, the company announced that it planned to implement a “scrape and sniff” feature on its search engine.
The jokes were so over-the-top that people learned to laugh at them as yet another example of Google’s mischief. This is why MM. Page and Brin decided to reveal something on April Fool’s Day that no one would have thought possible 20 years ago.
It was Gmail, a free service with a gigabyte of storage per account, an amount that can seem almost insignificant in the age of terabyte iPhones. At the time, this storage capacity seemed simply absurd, since it could store around 13,500 emails before running out of space, compared to only 30 to 60 emails for the major online email services of the time, managed by Yahoo and Microsoft. The storage space for electronic messages was therefore 250 to 500 times larger.
In addition to this leap in storage space, Gmail also comes equipped with Google’s search technology, which allows users to quickly find an item from an old email message, a photo or other stored personal information on the service. It also allows you to automatically line up a series of communications on the same subject, so that everything flows together as if it were a single conversation.
The concept was so astonishing that soon after the Associated Press published an article about Gmail late in the afternoon of April Fool’s Day, 2004, readers began calling and emailing to inform the news agency that she had been duped by Google pranksters.
“That was part of the charm: creating a product that people don’t believe is real. “It kind of changed people’s perception of what kinds of applications were possible in a web browser,” Paul Buchheit, a former Google engineer, recalled in a recent interview with the AP about his efforts to create Gmail.
It took him three years to create it as part of a project called “Caribou”, in reference to a gag from the comic strip Dilbert. “There was something absurd in the name Caribou, it made me laugh,” Mr. Buchheit said on 23e employee hired in a company which today has more than 180,000 employees.
The AP knew Google wasn’t kidding about Gmail, because an AP reporter was abruptly asked to come from San Francisco to the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to see something worthwhile. to make the trip.
After arriving at a still-developing campus that would soon become the “Googleplex,” the AP reporter was led into a small office where Mr. Page wore a mischievous smile as he sat at his laptop.
Mr. Page, who was just 31 at the time, began showing off Gmail’s sleekly designed inbox and how quickly it worked in Microsoft’s now-retired Explorer web browser. He also pointed out that no delete button appeared in the main control window, as this would not be necessary, given that Gmail has such a large storage space and it is possible to perform there searches just as easily. “I think people are really going to like it,” Mr. Page predicted.
As with many other things, Mr. Page was right. Gmail now has around 1.8 billion active accounts, each now offering 15 gigabytes of free storage with Google Photos and Google Drive. Even though this represents 15 times more storage space than what Gmail initially offered, it is still insufficient for many users who rarely feel the need to purge their account, as Google hoped.
The digital accumulation of emails, photos and other content is why Google, Apple and other companies make money by selling additional storage capacity in their data centers (in the case of Google , prices range from US$30 per year for 200 gigabytes of storage to US$250 per year for 5 terabytes of storage). The existence of Gmail also explains why other free email services and internal email accounts used by employees for work offer much more storage capacity than could be imagined 20 years ago. years.
“We were trying to change the way people thought, because they had been working in this storage shortage model for so long that deleting had become a default action,” Mr. Buchheit said.
Gmail was a game-changer in many other ways, while also becoming the cornerstone of the expansion of Google’s internet empire beyond its still-dominant search engine.
Gmail was followed by Google Maps and Google Docs, with word processing and spreadsheet applications. Then came the acquisition of the video site YouTube, followed by the introduction of the Chrome browser and the Android operating system that powers most of the world’s smartphones. With the explicitly stated intention of Gmail.