Gmail was launched 20 April Fools’ Days ago. The joke’s been on its rivals.
Gmail was launched 20 April Fools’ Days ago. The joke’s been on its rivals.
It turns out Google has a weird habit of making news on April 1. Real news — not April Fools’ joke kinda news.
The headline on April 1 this year — Monday — is that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has agreed to delete billions of data records it collected from people who have used the Chrome browser’s Incognito mode.
It’s part of a settlement from a lawsuit in 2020, alleging that the company misled consumers about how private Incognito mode was.
(Maybe we should take a moment to acknowledge that nothing you do on the internet is really private.)
Anyway, the news 20 years ago was probably more exciting for the company. On April 1, 2004, Google announced it would launch an email service called Gmail.
People thought the company’s promise of a gigabyte of free email storage was an actual April Fools’ joke. But as it turned out, the joke was on Yahoo, Hotmail and all the other email services whose user bases are far smaller than the 3 billion users of Google Workspace, which includes Gmail, Docs and other programs.
Technology design consultant Jared Spool has 119,000 emails in his Gmail inbox. I asked him to look up the oldest. He said it’s a joke email from his father, dated Sept. 22, 2010 — one of those chain emails that maybe was funnier 14 years ago.
Spool said the big reason Gmail attracted early adopters was the promise of never having to delete an email you didn’t really want to delete.
Now, Gmail is basically Spool’s external memory.
“I use it as much as an archive of history, the history of my relationship with a person as much as anything else,” he said.
Users don’t want to part with that archive or go through the hassle of migrating it to another service.
Jason Fried, founder of the e-mail company Hey, said users are also reluctant to update all those accounts connected to Gmail — streaming, banking, dad joke newsletters.
“It’s the keys to your entire digital kingdom,” he said.
That doesn’t necessarily mean we love Gmail, though. Or email in general.
“What we find consistently is that email is associated with stress,” said Gloria Mark. She researches tech and the workplace at the University of California, Irvine.
Which might be a problem because, Mark said, we check it an average of 77 times a day.
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