The Sunday Times
November 20, 2005
In this latest extract from his book, David Vise looks at why Google’s powerful e-mail service ran into a storm of protest over privacy
IN the spring of 2004, with business booming and Google basking in the glow of its ever-growing popularity, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s founders, prepared to dazzle internet users with a different kind of e-mail.
They called the new service
“Gmail” (in Britain it is known as Google Mail after a trademark dispute).
They built it to be smarter, cheaper and easier to use. To make the new service an instant hit, they planned to give away one free gigabyte (1,000 megabtyes) of storage on Google’s own network with each Gmail account.
That was 500 times greater than the free storage offered by Microsoft and 250 times the free storage offered by Yahoo. This was a service Google could afford to provide because of the way it built its own high-powered computer network.
To inject Gmail with that Googley sense of magic, computer users would be able to find e-mails instantly, without ever having to think about sorting or storing them. A Gmail search would be fast, accurate and as easy to perform as a Google search.
Unlike most of its new products, Gmail was designed to make money even during the test phase. With demand for advertising increasing, the company needed to increase the amount of space it could sell.
Full report in the
TimesonLine
