The Google Story by David A. Vise & Mark Malseed

Author:David A. Vise & Mark Malseed [Vise, David A. & Malseed, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2005-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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TO GIVE GMAIL an added dimension of fun and free publicity, Larry and Sergey chose to announce the hot new offering on April 1, 2004. In prior years, Google had made fanciful April Fools announcements as a joke, so when journalists and others heard about Gmail’s gigabyte of free storage on April Fools’ Day 2004, they wouldn’t know whether it was real or made-up. That would generate more chatter and questions, heightening interest without costing the company any money on advertising or marketing. And that was just the way the Google Guys wanted it.

On April 1, 2004, Google issued a press release headlined: “Search is Number Two Online Activity—Email is Number One; ‘Heck, Yeah,’ Say Google Founders.” The release said that the inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services. “She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them,” said Larry Page. “And when she’s not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four-megabyte limit. So she asked, ‘Can’t you people fix this?’ ”

Millions of M&M’s later, Gmail was born. “If a Google user has a problem with email, well, so do we,” Brin said. “And while developing Gmail was a bit more complicated than we anticipated, we’re pleased to be able to offer it to the user who asked for it.” Page and Brin noted that Google would make the service available first to a small number of test users and that “with luck, Gmail will prove popular.”

The press release made no mention of the ads Google intended to place in the emails, but in interviews that day, Wayne Rosing, then Google’s vice president for engineering, revealed the plans. “Gmail grew out of experiments that were done that involved our ad targeting,” he said. “We did some textual analysis and were able to make it work.” While starting with test users and intentionally keeping Gmail scarce enough to increase its popular appeal, Rosing added, “We certainly think millions to tens of millions of users in a reasonably short period of time is a possibility.”

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