Hi, I'm Gmail. And I'm Hotmail.
I have one gigabyte of storage, which means I
don't have to keep deleting my emails.
Well, don't you think that deleting your emails
can be rather therapeutic?
Sure, buddy. I can also use keywords to search
quickly through my email. How about you?
Well, I keep my favorite emails in a folder.
Like, uh let's see here, somewhere.
Another moment
here, sorry. Hey Hotmail, good to see you again.
Hello, Gmail. Looks like I have 1.5
billion users now. How about you?
Well, just want to clarify, my name is Outlook
now. And let's see, I have a few hundred million
users, but it's not a popularity contest, is it?
No, of course not.
Gmail is really dominating that market for
consumer email, which is a bit odd because in
most mature markets you have an oligopoly of at
least three players, but it looks like Google is
absolutely dominating this market.
With 1.5 billion users worldwide, Gmail is now
the most widely used email provider in the world,
but it was by no means the first.
When Gmail launched in April of 2004, it became
one of a number of free email services alongside
Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, which were some of the
first to introduce web-based email in the 1990s.
By 1998, Yahoo Mail already had 12 million active
users, and by 1999, Hotmail had about 30 million
active members. The Gmail project came out of
something called 20 percent time, and this was
something that was really a hallmark of Google
culture in the early days.
So 20 percent time works like this.
If the rest of your time, if you took that one
hundred percent and devoted 20 percent of it to a
project that you were interested in or excited
about or passionate about or wanted to chase
down, that's what you could do.
And Gmail came out of that 20 percent time.
Paul Buchheit started working at Google in 1999
as its 23rd employee.
He undertook creating Google's foray into the
email world as his 20 percent project.
At the time, the project was codenamed "caribou,"
an allusion to the popular comic strip Dilbert.
But not everyone at Google was supportive of his
vision. Even though we know Gmail's so big and
the most used email service, it almost didn't
happen because there were so many arguments among
executives about whether they should actually
pursue it. And it wasn't quite clear how Google
could benefit from an online email service when
they were a search company. One of the things
that Google did was they looked at problems as
projects. So they put things to what they called
a toothbrush test.
So if you were interacting with a problem as much
as you interact with your toothbrush, then they
were excited to take that on.
And email certainly fit that bill because people
used it all the time and it was growing during
this time. For something that was use all the
time, email in the early 2000s was still not very
user-friendly. The first thing Gmail set out to
improve was storage.
At the time, other email providers offered up to
4 megabytes of storage.
What that meant was you had to delete, delete,
delete all the time or your storage would be
full. And then if your parents or an employer
sent you an email, it was bounced back.
And the next thing you know, your phone is
ringing and someone is saying, 'I'm trying to
email you and I can't get through.'
So that was the first thing that they were going
to address by offering one gigabyte of storage.
This effectively meant that you would never have
to delete email again.
And this was revolutionary at the time.
So when Gmail first released its product, it
didn't even have a delete button.
And this was to bring home the point that you
didn't ever have to delete an email.
Ever! Gmail's other big improvement: search.
Google offered that signature, clutter-free look
that you saw with the Google homepage in Gmail.
They also took a look at using their search
engine feature as a part of the email so that if
you wanted to find a specific email that someone
sent you on a specific topic, it was easy.
You just used the search bar to find it.
And at the time, no one else offered that.
Besides storage space and search, Gmail also
introduced a way of grouping messages that many
of us consider standard today.
Conversation threading grouped all replies to a
message in one place and in order, making it
easier to grasp the context of a conversation.
That was what Google was all about, whether it
was the search engine or Gmail, they wanted to
make it easier for the user.
When it was easier for the user, more people
bought in and adopted this new technology.
What gave Gmail some of its capabilities was the
fact that it used a more advanced computer
language called JavaScript.
What JavaScript delivered was a much more
interactive and responsive experience for the
user compared to the competition, which was
reloading each page, repainting each page, and it
was a slower process.
And so JavaScript delivered a much faster and
more interactive experience for the consumer.
Gmail was launched in 2004, on April 1st.
It was April Fool's Day.
So people actually thought it was a hoax and it
wasn't real, but it was.
Gmail initially launched in a unique manner: as
invite only. The reason why Google, which turned
out to be a wonderful marketing ploy, made it
exclusive and you had to apply and try to get on
the wait list for a Gmail account is because they
weren't investing enough. They couldn't scale up
the back end to meet demand, and so they had to
make sure that they were able to keep up with the
flow. And the only way they could do that is to
let people in on invitation only.
Gmail's invite only rollout made having a Gmail
address a hot commodity.
Some even went as far as selling their Gmail
invites on eBay. It wasn't until 2007 that Gmail
finally launched to everyone without an invite.
Since about 2012, Gmail has been doing
exceedingly well compared to the competition.
At Google I/O 2012, the company announced that
Gmail had reached $425 million monthly active
users. This put it ahead of Hotmail's
self-reported 360 million monthly active users
and Yahoo Mail's estimated 277 million users in
2011. At the time, there were some disputes about
the exact numbers, but soon Gmail's popularity
became evident. In a written statement to CNBC,
Senior Director of Project Management for Yahoo
Mail, Josh Jacobson, said, 'Gmail has seen user
growth for a number of reasons, including
promotion as the default email provider on
Android devices and familiarity driven by use in
the enterprise and education via Chromebooks.'
The main factors that have led to the rise in
popularity of Gmail.
First of all, Google is a central property on the
web and so there's a halo effect.
And so you go to Google for YouTube and you go
for Google Apps and for search and for maps.
Why not go for email?
Gmail went from being an underdog to the most
used email service in the world because it was
able to incorporate a lot of Google's core
technologies. Another example of one of our core
products, which we are redesigning with A.I.
is Gmail. We just had a new, fresher look for
Gmail, a recent redesign.
Hope you're all enjoying using it.
We are bringing another feature to Gmail.
We call it Smart Compose.
So as the name suggests, we use machine learning
to start suggesting phrases for you as you type.
All you need to do is to hit 'tab' and keep auto
completing. Some of Gmail's more recent
innovations include the ability to schedule
emails and Confidential Mode, which prevents
recipients from forwarding, copying, printing or
downloading your message.
Though they are still able to screenshot it.
Another draw: being able to use your Gmail sign
in on other websites and apps.
When we look at 'sign in with,' I mean, this is
where we talk about the competition between the
digital dragons.
And so you can sign in with Facebook, you can
sign in with Amazon, you can sign in with Apple.
And so the fact that you can sign in with Google
allows them to compete head-to-head with those
other digital dragons.
And the fact that you can use Gmail or Google to
sign in really reinforces the power of their
control of that consumer email market.
We also see their presence in the education space
as leading to pull through when folks select a
consumer email address.
And then, momentum builds more momentum.
And so as you get tired of your old ISP-based
email and you're embarrassed about your AOL email
account, you look around and you look at what
your friends are using. And if they're gonna be
using Gmail, you may tend to move over to Gmail
yourself. They started off as a very innovative
product and they've continued to innovate.
Gmail was gaining popularity fast, but it was not
all smooth sailing for the new platform.
Finding a way to monetize Gmail had been a point
of contention at the company.
Some people argued Gmail should be a paid service
from the get-go. But others argued that in order
for Gmail to have the most reach, it needed to be
ad driven. The ad revenue model won out, but even
before it launched the general public in 2007,
Google got heat for scanning Gmail emails and
using the contents for targeted advertising.
If you're emailing someone about, hey, let's meet
up and go sailing, and then suddenly there was an
ad for sailboat tours.
It was unnerving for people because it was so
spot-on and people called it creepy and spooky.
And suddenly the headlines were very negative for
Google and for Gmail.
The practice also made some privacy groups and
politicians uneasy.
The year Gmail launched, 31 privacy and consumer
groups sent a letter to Google's co-founders
saying that scanning emails for ad purposes,
'violates the implicit trust of an email service
provider.' Shortly after Gmail's launch, former
California senator, Liz Figueroa, even drafted a
bill that would place limits on the information
gathered from scanning email messages that could
be shared with third parties.
The bill passed the California State Senate, but
died in the state Assembly.
It would take another 10 years after its wide
public launch for Google to commit to no longer
scanning any Gmail account for the purpose of
personalizing ads.
When we asked why it took 10 years for the
company to stop scanning emails for ad purposes,
a Google spokesperson emailed CNBC directing us
to this blog post.
Google declined an on-camera interview with CNBC.
But this was not the end to Google's privacy
problems. This headline just dropping on Google
that the company still does allow other companies
to scan and share data from Gmail accounts.
This according to The Journal, citing a letter to
U.S. lawmakers in which Google says that the
company does allow app developers specifically to
scan Gmail accounts.
Even though, the company, remember, itself
stopped the practice for the purpose of ad
targeting last year.
A month later, Google issued new privacy policies
that put limits on how developers can use Gmail
data. One of the interesting things about Gmail
is that even when this controversy about privacy
was unfolding and kind of blowing up, more and
more people started to use it.
And it was just so much better than anything else
that was out there that that's really when people
started to say, you know, maybe there is a
privacy concern. Maybe I am concerned about this,
but this service is so good that I'm using it
anyway. Privacy became a hot-button issue in 2018
as numerous tech companies, including Facebook,
Amazon, Apple and Google were grilled by Congress
about consumer data privacy.
With Americans carrying their phones with them
virtually at all times, doesn't the collection of
this volume of detailed information really mean
that Google is compiling information about
virtually every movement an individual with a
smartphone is making every hour of every day
today? For any service we provide our users, we
go to great lengths to protect their privacy and
we give them transparency, choice and control.
In addition to email, users of Gmail have access
to a number of free applications, including
Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Drive and
Google Hangouts, among others.
When you have Google Apps associated with Gmail,
it's quite sticky, right?
If you're using Google Apps associated with
Gmail, you're probably not going to move.
Google took office tools to the web and forced
Microsoft to do the same.
Microsoft Office Web Apps became available to the
general public in 2010 and included free
lightweight versions of programs like Microsoft
Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
But while Outlook may trail Gmail and Google Apps
on the consumer side, Microsoft's business suite
offering, Microsoft Office, still reigns supreme
in the $18 billion market for business
productivity tools.
In more recent years, Google has also come out
with a paid version of its online apps called G
Suite. G Suite includes all of Google's free
office tool apps, as well as additional features
such as the ability to create a custom email
domain and admin controls that are aimed at
businesses. Outlook and Gmail are similar in the
sense that they both have free and premium tiers
as well as business tiers, but they're different
in terms of where their sweet spots are.
I would say that Outlook is widely used within
businesses and government agencies and Gmail is
more popular overall with consumers.
Microsoft Office still holds 87.5
percent of the business productivity tool market
compared to G Suite, which holds 10.4
percent. But Google is working to change that.
Google unveiling its first Gmail redesign since
2013. The overhaul has a slew of new features
designed to attract businesses to take on
Microsoft's Outlook. Google says it now has more
than 5 million paying G Suite customers compared
to Microsoft Office 365, which has more than 200
million paying customers.
I think Gmail absolutely is coming up in the
corporate world and it is happening as Google is
taking G Suite into businesses, government
agencies, schools and saying use this.
Oftentimes, use this instead of Microsoft Office.
And soon, Gmail's revenue stream from consumers
may also get a bump.
Many free users are quickly reaching their 15
gigabyte storage limit, which is shared between
Gmail, Google Drive and photos, and finding that
they need a paid subscription to keep everything
on the cloud. 15 years later, Gmail's big bet on
storage may really pay off.