Entrepreneurship within a company

The Gmail story is the first instance in the Founders series of a startup emerging within a larger company. Innovation within large companies is getting more attention as executives realize they need to nurture and spin off innovative projects or risk withering as smaller startups leapfrog them with a disruptive technology. The latest issue of Fast Company devotes a full spread to a story called “Innovation Scouts” - teams of people within companies like Adobe and Ebay whose sole function is to identify, promote and cultivate innovations internally.

A different set of challenges

Buchheit recounts that one of the tricky things about the project was that it held and entirely different set of challenges than they were used to solving with web search. When indexing the web it was acceptable to have several days’ latency in seeing the search results appear on Google. With email, users expected instantaneous search results for emails they had just sent. The other issue was reliability - lose a machine with web site data indexed and you just go re-index it, lose people’s email and you have a huge black eye for your service and people will be vocal in their rants. Gmail’s offering was 1GB (now 2.8GB) compared to the traditional 2-4MB so they faced huge storage demands as their user base grew. All these challenges in the face of an already-skeptical internal audience meant an uphill battle to get the green light for the Gmail project.

A different take on email

Before Gmail existed, people were used to the conventional idea of web email. Buchheit was able to suspend some of these notions, strip things down to their core essence and look at email differently. He used this view of email to make several major disruptions in the traditional model:

1. Save everything - He realized that people deleted mail for a couple reasons. Either they wanted to conserve space, have fewer emails to make search more manageable or because they genuinely wanted a message destroyed. He realized the huge storage capacity would nix the first motivator, having powerful search features would nix the second and giving people the option to truly delete a message would satisfy the last. Instead of deleting messages as the default manner to clear one’s inbox though, Gmail made the default action “archive” so the messages would be saved. This was a radical departure from the traditional approach of having users delete messages.
2. Tagging - Another concept that was novel to email was tagging. It was just starting to appear in the social bookmarking services but had not yet appeared in categorization of emails. Email users were familiar with the concept of sorting their email by hierarchical folders- tagging flattened this paradigm by allowing a message to exist in a giant catchall directory and having different “tags” applied to it so that it could be classified under multiple tags depending on what it was.
3. Auto complete - This seems almost ridiculously simple to merit mentioning by today’s standards but it was breakthrough at the time: auto address completion when composing a new email. The desktop email clients had it but Buchheit applied it to Gmail.
4. Conversation view - A byproduct of working from the Google Groups codebase, Gmail offered a way to read your inbox so that replies to a given message were viewable in a threaded conversation format color-coded by author. It made following the conversation a more coherent experience.
5. Hide quoted text - to improve the Signal-to-noise ratio, Gmail auto-hides quoted text in email replies assuming that the reader already has the context from an email they sent previously. Again, this improved the continuity of the experience when reading a bunch of emails from a conversation in sequence.

Not one but two innovations

As if Gmail weren’t enough of a contribution to Google’s success, Buchheit also conceived and implemented the first prototype for what is now AdSense. As a Friday experiment Buchheit whipped up some javascript code that would allow targeted ads to be served from other peoples’ web sites. Like Gmail, AdSense initially met with resistance internally but once people understood the implications it had for expanding their advertising market, it flew. Buchheit says: “I think , in general, people are uncomfortable with things that are different. Even now when I talk about adding new features to Gmail, if it isn’t just a small variation or rearranging what’s already there, people don’t like it. People have a narrow concept of what’s possible, and we’re limited more by our own ideas about what’s possible than what really is possible. So they just get uncomfortable, and they kind of tend to attack it for whatever reason.”

Fortunately for Google, employee #23 was successful in championing both of his innovations and AdSense and Gmail are now both irreplaceable applications in the family of Google apps. Google IPO’d in August of 2004 raising $1.67BN. It was named America’s fastest growing tech company by Forbes in 2004 and employs over 12,000 full-time employees world-wide.

This entry was posted by Sean Tierney on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.