The Gmail Creation Story

Warren Bennis recently wrote Google's engineers, founders and CEO have all the earmarks of a Great Group—a talent driven organization or enterprise, filled with people who set out to do something extraordinary and succeed in doing something that's never been done before. And like other Great Groups, Google has a few unique twists of its own.Google, whose revolutionary approach to search dominates the field, seems to have the ingredients that have produced greatness in the past. Whether commercially successful or not, all our Great Groups were daring innovators who were convinced not just of the importance of their work but that they were all but on a mission from God. All were carefully chosen collections of extraordinary talents who worked on their world-changing projects with an obsessive brio that often made them forget to eat or sleep—and occasionally doomed their marriages. However brilliant, they all believed, at least for the duration of the project, that "None of us is as smart as all of us."
Gmail is perhaps the biggest success among Google's recent launches.Paul Buchheit, Gmail Engineer writes about the creation of Gmail. – With ideas, many people were consulted about their email expecations. The idea was not to to simply bolt new features onto old interfaces but to rethink email. It was also realized that solving everyone's problems was too big of a challenge for the first release. It would be better to build a product that a lot of people love, than one that everyone tolerates, and so that was our goal.. Gmail got rolled out in April 2004 with 1000 MB of storage. Its Google’s philosophy to do as much as possible for users. Besides storage, Gmail included a quick and accurate search. It introduced powerful new concepts to organize email, such as the conversation view (so all those replies can be seen at once). It provided a fast and dynamic interface from web browsers everywhere, popularizing the techniques that have since become known as AJAX. This interface included many important features not commonly found on the web at that time, such as email address auto-completion, a slick spell-checker, keyboard shortcuts, and pages that update instantly. It included a smart spam filter to get rid of junk mail. Finally, Gmail made an important new promise: like cell phone users, one can keep all Gmail address & email, even if decided to move out of Gmail.or you. He notes that the free storage keeps increasing (2656 MB and counting), and there are interfaces in 38 languages, & has features such as auto-save drafts.