Copying Email for Money and Profit
I’ve been around for a while. I used to think that didn’t really matter, but as I get older it becomes increasingly astonishing that people half my age don’t know all the “everybody knows” conventional wisdom floating around in my head. After all, it’s COMMON KNOWLEDGE, people. Only, I guess it isn’t, if you weren’t there.
Google Copies, Destroys, Profits
These days, Google is seen as a major innovator, a tech giant that changed the fact of the internet, nay the world, forever. People who worked at Google get this sort of carte-blanche, “They must be awesome,” whether that is true or not.
Come, children, gather round and Uncle Brian will tell you a story about how he grew more bitter.
Google Mail Was Junk
Google Mail was a revolution in email. It was not a revolution of better quality. It was not a revolution in functionality. It was not a revolution of design. It was not a revolution in any way shape or form, except for one thing. It was free.
Now, there were other free emails. Microsoft had one, and there was Hotmail and some others. But all these free email services had one thing is common. They were free until you reached 25MB of online email storage. Then, you had to pay for more storage. This was how you built a profitable email service.
So, how did Google build an email contender? By building a loser.
The reality is that Google Mail was worse than the competition in every possible was except one: more free storage.
Now, 25 MB might be laughable today, but back then, 25 MB wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t a lot either however, which is how Google captured the online email market virtually overnight.
The biggest killer was image files, like saving calligraphy styles or calligraphic alphabets, for example. For some MP3 files, and for a smaller portion, video files were all big enough to encroach on the limit rather quickly. The ever-bloating Microsoft Office files didn’t help, but it was mostly the multi-media that caused the problem.
At the time, we worked around the 25MB limit as best we could. We created multiple Hotmail or Yahoo email accounts so we could store attachments in those and keep our “real” email free, but just because it could be done doesn’t mean we liked it.
Google Mail debuted with not just 2 GB of storage, but OVER 2 GB of storage. How much wasn’t important really, since only very specific people would ever take up 2GB of email space, but there was a counter on the main Google Mail page showing you just how much “over 2GB” of storage you got.
This screen grab from the Wayback Machine at Internet Archive on February 15, 2006, shows the Google Mail home page and, “Over 2697.048674 megabytes (and counting).” Ironically, even the archived image is counting up, so clearly the actual amount of storage wasn’t really tied to anything at all. Just a marketing gimmick.
Before Google renamed itself Alphabet, it was very careful to never break out the profitability of each product or department. This helped to perpetuate the myth that everything Google did was the pinnacle of technology. The reality, though, was much different.
Like so many of Google’s products, Gmail was not revolutionary. Heck, it wasn’t even up to the standards of the time. So, how did Gmail become the biggest, most used, email on the internet?
By losing money. Lots of money.
Why do I remember this so well? I remember a lot of things, that I assumed everyone else remembered as well, but that is increasingly not the case. What really bothered me about this, however, was some time later reading about someone who was being touted as the best because they worked on Gmail.
I knew that Google mail wasn’t great. I knew that given the go ahead and lose as much money as you want, any one of a dozen companies could have made better email products. The only thing Mr. Gmail should get credit for is building the most expensive, least profitable email service ever, not for being some tech visionary. Alas, tech, like finance, loves its stars, no matter how they got made, so Mr. Google it is.
Once Google started offering 2GBs for free, the other email providers had to do the same or perish, but it took too long for Microsoft and Yahoo to react. By the time they matched Google for storage, Google was already the default email on the internet for anyone who knew anything, and unlike Google, they didn’t really have money to burn.
There is an irony about this whole article. This article started being about how Facebook is copying and buying all of its “advances” just like Google before it, and Microsoft before them. But I thought it would be more powerful by giving some examples of how Google and Microsoft swallowed up innovation and then took credit for it, and somehow, my fingers never stopped moving.
I figure if Medium is for my “extra” writing, then this “extra bit” from an extra article would fit right in.
Besides, I don’t like wasting almost 900 words, so here we go. How Google stole the idea for internet email and then memory holed how it got there.
Enjoy.
