Failure is the key to success; every mistake teaches us something. – Morihei UeshibaSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Contrary to popular belief, Gmail was not born from Google's legendary 20% time. The creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, had already started working on messaging software in 1996 on a personal basis. These were the days before Hotmail, and Paul hadn't been happy with email for a while: he was in college and had to return to his dorm every time he wanted to check his email. Buchheit thought, “This is so stupid. I should be able to check it anywhere. He had some ideas and wanted to create a web-based email. However, Buchheit wasn't really sure what he was doing and didn't know exactly where his random project was going. He eventually got bored and, despite his interest in email, the service never really came to fruition. A few years later, Buchheit joined Google in 1999 as its 23rd employee. In 2001, Larry Page asked Buchheit if he was interested in creating some type of messaging or personalization product. Larry Page and Sergey Brin simply said, "We think this is an interesting area" and let Buchheit take care of it. The Google founders did not provide any specific instructions or direction. In the early 2000s, email was a clunky desktop program that hadn't evolved much since its inception. The interfaces were slow and webmail storage was terrible. Hotmail offered users a paltry 2MB of storage, while Yahoo gave them a slightly better 4MB. One of Buchheit's first projects at Google was Google Groups. By 2001, Groups had acquired Usenet's vast database of news feeds, articles, discussions and messages. Usenet was one of the oldest widely used computer network communications systems, with archives dating back to 1980. Google Groups had essentially indexed all of Usenet's content. Since Buchheit already knew the Group's code, he simply pointed the powerful Groups search function to his own email rather than Usenet. The first version of Gmail was built in a day: an email search engine. At first, Buchheit's email search engine ran on a server at his office. And he only searched for Buchheit's email. Even then, this was useful to other engineers at Google, as they shared much of the same email as Paul. Google's work culture at the time relied heavily on email, and Buchheit received 500 emails every day. There was a request for research by email. Buchheit's colleagues quickly requested this feature for themselves, so they could search their own email. Buchheit then added several new features that set Gmail apart from its competitors and have since proliferated across other email clients: Large storage. 1 GB in 2004 was a huge amount of storage, compared to the 2 to 4 MB typically available on the market. Gmail was the first webmail provider to introduce autocomplete. People were sending emails so quickly that autocomplete saved them from having to remember email addresses. Gmail allowed users to archive emails instead of deleting them. Buchheit discovered that users were deleting their emails either because they were running out of space,!