Thread by @FinEklavya

The Story Of Gmail

How Gmail overthrew giants like Yahoo and Hotmail and became the undisputed leader of the Email service industry.

Decoded!🕵️

@FI_InvestIndia @contrarianEPS @Vivek_Investor @Gautam__Baid @NeerajMarathe @caniravkaria

🧵👇

The dawn of the information age in the early 1990s marked a meteoric rise in the global email industry with Yahoo and Hotmail as the first tech behemoths to acquire a lion’s market share of 12 million and 30 million active users respectively.

Gmail, on the other hand, was very late to the party as it was launched only in 2004. And as is apparent, it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk for Gmail to dislodge these giants.

Today, Gmail has more than 1.8 billion active users & commands a monopoly in the consumer email market.

The magic lies in the fact that Gmail went from being an underdog to being the most widely used email in the world, making the competition almost irrelevant.

When Google launched Gmail on April 1st as a crazy marketing gimmick, for people, it was nothing more than a prank.

But seventeen years since its inception, it is evident that Gmail was no joke. It was not only real but revolutionary in its truest sense.

Paul Buchheit, the 23rd employee of Google & leader of the Gmail team began working on it in 2001 as his 20% time project.

The 20% time project was a brilliant policy of Google in those days wherein their engineers devoted 20% of the time to a project they were passionate about.

Even though Paul was highly driven towards this product, there was a lot of criticism for Gmail within the company.

It was considered to be a bad idea from a strategic viewpoint and nobody seemed to understand how a mail service had anything to do with a web search- Google’s primary business.

They believed that it was a call for the Microsoft-backed Hotmail to come and kill them.

Despite all this skepticism, the 2 men who trusted Paul & the huge potential of this market were the Google founders-Sergey Brin & Larry Page.

Innovation & experimentation have always been the key for Google which is exactly what made the founders support Paul in this project.

With that green signal, Paul, along with his team, began building features in Gmail according to the team's own needs.

As part of a web search company, the first most significant feature he built was a search engine within the email.

This made it easy for an account holder to search for an email from any sender on any topic. All it took was to type a few keywords to get to your desired mails.

The fact that mail providers like Hotmail provided only a few megabytes of space negated the need for a search engine.

After all, it’s unlikely to lose an email with such low storage and only a handful of emails.

But as Gmail developed the search feature, it demanded some serious storage capacity to actually search something from abundance.

Thus, Gmail was launched with 1 GB of storage- 500 times more than that of Hotmail’s!

Even by the early 2000s, emails weren’t quite user-friendly because they were built on HTML.

Almost every action one took on Yahoo or Hotmail required them to reload the entire page, making the entire process too cumbersome.

Gmail was the first email programmed in an advanced language ‘Javascript’ which made its interface highly interactive and responsive.

This made Gmail look more like a software than a sequence of web pages.

The only con of Javascript at the time was that it took a decent server capacity to run & earlier, there were hardly any good web browsers.

Thus, a fear of crashing browsers loomed large on the team but they went ahead anyway. As they say, nothing great comes without a risk.

Interestingly, when Google announced the release date of Gmail, they weren’t ready to launch.

They had always wanted the service to be fully accessible to everyone but due to a dearth of server capacity, it was impossible for them to provide millions of people a reliable email.

The only way they could have released the product was by letting people in on ‘invitation’ only. Only those with the Gmail invites could make an email and use the service.

Steadily, Gmail’s shortcoming turned into the most amazing marketing ploy ever.

The invites-only strategy made Gmail a hot commodity.

Some people even went as far as selling their Gmail invites on eBay. There were bids up to $150 for a single Gmail invite!

In 2007, Gmail finally made its service free & since then, its trajectory has only gone upward.

One of the most influential factors of Gmail's growth has been the influence of Google.

Google being a central property on the web has definitely created an edge for Gmail.

Gmail is promoted as the default email provider on all android devices.

The fact that one can use Gmail to sign in on other websites really reinforces the power of their control on the consumer email market.

In this ever-evolving network age with rapidly changing consumer preferences, Gmail is not only surviving but in fact, thriving.

The brilliance lies in Google’s ability to have built an ecosystem. It may have begun as a search engine but caters to a very diverse market today.

In addition to an email account, Gmail automatically allows its users access to the other free applications of Google such as Google Sheets, Google docs, Google Drive and Google Maps.

This integration of all its services makes Gmail very sticky and thus, invincible.

Gmail was certainly a bet that Google took and all these years later, it looks like it has been truly paid off.

And while it may not have been the first in this market but in the long term, it could probably be the only one to last.