Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were known for their love of pranks, often rolling outlandish ideas every April Fools’ Day. These included posting a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon and claiming they would add a “scratch and sniff” feature to their search engine.
People became so used to their ridiculous jokes that they were dismissed as just another Google trick. Therefore, nobody took Page and Brin’s April Fools’ Day announcement that they were about to reveal an email service seriously.
Gmail was a free email service that offered an incredible 1 GB of storage per account, a huge quantity compared to it’s competitors like Yahoo that offered only 30 to 60 emails at the time. Gmail also brought new features like automatic chat threading and Google’s search technology for speedy email retrieval.
The original pitch was all about the three ‘S’s’ — storage, search, and speed.”, according to Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive who worked on the Gmail design
The first story about Gmail was published by The Associated Press on April 1st, 2004, so everyone who read the story at that time thought it was a prank. However, Google never jokes when it comes to business. The development process of Gmail took 3 years before it finally launched with a modest scope since Google’s computing capacity at that time was still limited.
Gmail was not immediately widely available; and this made it even more desirable. It even reached the stage where people were willing to pay $250 on eBay for an invitation just to sign up. But then Google eventually made Gmail accessible to all in 2007.
With the development of Gmail, Google spread its boundaries from search engines to creating new services such as Google Maps, Google Docs, YouTube, and the Chrome browser. The triumph of Gmail also demonstrates a departure from traditional views on digital storage and privacy.
As of now, Gmail has attained an approximate total of 1.8 billion active accounts and has not stopped coming up with new ideas. Although its commencement was initially dismissed as a joke played on the First Day of April, Gmail remains a well-recognized fixture in our digital existence – part and parcel of how we exchange letters or maintain virtual records of events and outcomes whenever we want.