“I was just graduated from school and was indoctrinated in usability tests and target users. “It didn’t look anything like what Gmail does now or even what it looked like when it launched,” he says. (He’s still at Google today, where he currently works on Android.) What he saw got him excited, but it was still an exceptionally rough draft. Gmail’s first product manager, Brian Rakowski, learned about the service from his boss, Marissa Mayer, on his first day at Google in 2002, fresh out of college. (FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook in 2009.) The Gmail team grew over time, but not exponentially even when the service launched in 2004, only a dozen or so people were working on it. “A lot of other people were much less supportive.”īuchheit had been working on his project for a month or two when he was joined by another engineer, Sanjeev Singh, with whom he’d found social-networking startup FriendFeed after leaving Google in 2006. “Larry and Sergey were always supportive,” Buchheit says. Some were also concerned that this would cause other companies such as Microsoft to kill us.”įortunately, the doubters didn’t include Google’s founders. “The concern was this didn’t have anything to do with web search. “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. Portals had a reputation for doing many things, but not necessarily doing them all that well. In its early years, one of the defining things about the company was its obsessive focus on its search engine that set it apart from Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and other search pioneers that had recast themselves as “portals,” expanding their ambitions to encompass everything from weather to sports to games to, yes, email. That wasn’t the no-brainer it might seem, even though Google had a maniacally email-centric culture itself. Still, long before Google chose to give Gmail users 1GB of space, it had to decide that Gmail would be a commercial product at all. 'A lot of people thought it was a very bad idea, from both a product and a strategic standpoint.' That led to the eventual decision to give each user 1GB of space, a figure Google settled on after considering capacities that were generous but not preposterous, such as 100MB. It’s tough, after all, to lose anything when all you’ve got is a couple of megabytes of space.īut serious search practically begged for serious storage: It opened up the possibility of keeping all of your email, forever, rather than deleting it frantically to stay under your limit. If it had merely matched Hotmail’s capacity, it wouldn’t have needed industrial-strength search. The fact that Gmail began with a search feature that was far better than anything offered by the major email services profoundly shaped its character. When he sought feedback from other engineers, their main input was that it should search their mail, too. His previous project had been Google Groups, which indexed the Internet’s venerable Usenet discussion groups: All he had to do was hack Groups’ lightning-fast search feature to point it at his mail rather than Usenet.Īt first, Buchheit’s email search engine ran on a server at his own desk. And it did indeed take only a day to accomplish.

With Gmail–which was originally code-named Caribou, borrowing the name of a mysterious corporate project occasionally alluded to in Dilbert–the first useful thing Buchheit built was a search engine for his own email.

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