I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [199]
I still had a role, though, and I did my best to fill it. I positioned Gmail not as a better competitor to Yahoo mail, but as an entirely new way of thinking about communication. It wasn't just that we gave users a hundred times the storage capacity (one gigabyte) for free, but that we added a search capability that eliminated the need to manually file every email in a folder so it could be found again. It wasn't a home run compared with other email systems. It was an entirely new ball game.
The only remaining piece to be resolved was the launch date. In February 2004, Sergey suggested that we launch Gmail on April Fools' Day. It would be amusing to watch the press grapple with whether we meant it for real or as a joke. I didn't see the humor in playing our biggest new product launch for laughs. I told Sergey so and repeated my concerns at a launch review meeting in March attended by the Gmail team and the executive staff. Eric shared my concerns, and as CEO, he made a top-down decision. Given all the effort that had gone into creating Gmail and its potential to open up important new markets for Google, we would not make a joke out of the launch. Larry and Sergey argued that the joke was a Googley thing to do, but Eric was insistent. We could launch on April 1, but we would make it clear that Gmail was for real.
I hung around the meeting as it broke up and followed Eric out to the stairwell. "Thanks for that," I said to him as he climbed up toward his office. "You made the right decision. It has to be frustrating arguing with Larry and Sergey about such obvious things."
Eric stopped and looked at me. "I'm well compensated," he said with a smile. "Now please excuse me while I walk around the building a few times."
Thinking back to the weeks before Gmail launched, I'm amazed at how much we got done. I don't mean overcoming the technical challenges, which were mind-boggling, or resolving legal questions, which were Byzantine, or addressing partner-management issues, which were delicate—I mean just handling the elements lobbed into marketing's corner of the court.
Those elements would have kept us busy if we had been a startup focused only on the launch of one product, but the reality was that Google's product-release process had become a rolling-thunder operation of sustained, high-impact launches. Behind Gmail taxied personalized search, web alerts, local search, and "Total Recall," our code name for software that searched a user's PC files. Those products also required preparation that couldn't wait until Gmail was out the door.
I had my own projects, as well, including a nationwide engineer-recruitment campaign, a college promotion in Japan, an online tour of new Google features, and a response to users about JewWatch, an anti-Semitic hate site that we were showing as the top search result for the word "Jew." I felt my life shift into "bullet time," the effect from the Matrix movies, where everything slows to a crawl while the protagonist's perception of time expands, enabling him to see projectiles speeding toward him. I was operating at peak capacity. Every keystroke, every utterance, every thought moved me closer to my goal. I lost track of how much espresso I drank, but I remember being thankful that we had more than one machine, and that each one could make two cups at a time.
So the last thing I wanted to hear, five days before the launch of Gmail, was that we were going to make it a joke after all. It wouldn't be the April Fools' joke—we would go with my idea about a Google lunar office for that—but the executive staff had decreed we would do a hybrid announcement of sorts.
There would be a press release that was factual, but with enough humorous elements to leave people wondering if Gmail was for real. We would brief a few journalists