Twenty Years Ago, Google Did The Only Good Tech April Fools Joke: It Launched Gmail For Real

Regular readers of Techdirt will know that we’ve never done any sort of April 1st jokes, even though people often send us ideas for them each year. The simple fact is: nearly all April Fools’ jokes are terrible, especially the silly corporate ones. They’re just bad.

With one exception.

Twenty years ago today, Google announced Gmail. And a ton of people assumed it was an April Fool’s joke. After all, Google’s press release reads… kinda like an April Fool’s joke. And Google has a long history of doing fake product announcements as April Fool’s jokes (and none of them are particularly funny).

People who weren’t online pre-Gmail simply do not realize how different the email world was back then. Web-based email systems had really only become popular in the late 90s (prior to that, most people would download their emails to a separate client using things like POP3). In the late 90s you had the rise of Rocketmail (bought by Yahoo and turned into Yahoo Mail) and then Hotmail (bought by Microsoft and turned into Outlook.com).

But both of those “free” web-based email offerings were slow and clunky and only let you store 10 to 15MB of email data at a time (which is… not very much). And you had to organize the email you did want to store in “folders.”

The real April Fool’s part of Gmail was that it was real. It was so incredibly different from what everyone knew of email. It was as if we had skipped a generation or two of innovation. It had massively more storage. The UI was more responsive (no one remembers how painfully slow it was to do anything in Yahoo Mail). Instead of a confusing set of folders, it used “labels” which allowed you to include multiple labels on a single piece of email. And, of course, it had useful and quick ability to search through old emails (something existing email programs were not at all good at). Oh, and somehow, it finally seemed to get spam filtering (mostly) right.

And even as Gmail has evolved quite a bit since its earliest version, the original still does stand out as quite an achievement:

And, as I pointed out in my Protocols, Not Platforms paper, I still think Gmail is a prime example of the potential of open protocols like those that power email. It rose to a dominant position by out-innovating the competitors, but it still has healthy competition and its dominance doesn’t mean anyone is locked in: it’s not hard to leave if you don’t like what Google is doing with it. If you don’t trust Google, there are plenty of other email service providers out there.

This creates an incentive for Google not to fuck up too much, because it doesn’t have the type of total lock-in that any other messenger service has, which is that when you leave, there’s no longer a way for you to communicate with others who use that system. With email, you can take your addressbook with you and just email them from your new address.

That’s not to say Gmail has been perfect. It clearly has its problems. But in one single not-really-April Fools joke, it completely reset the baseline for email. It’s pretty rare to see that ever happen, and that’s why it remains the one good tech April Fool’s joke.