They’d put them all in the same folder—or they would forget and put them in
the wrong folder and then the conversation would get split and they could
never find the reply to this message.
There were all these little tools and tricks that people had for reassembling
the conversations. Why not just put them all together to start with? At some
point, we said, “Let’s hide the quoted text too.” Because that way you can just
read it much faster without having to read the same content over and over. We
were...

Google is that we can just release things internally and have this great population
of testers, essentially. So people inside have been using Gmail for a long
time. The code name was Caribou. Initially, I called it Gmail, and then we realized
that was not really very subtle, so we changed it to Caribou.
Livingston: Did you choose Caribou?
Buchheit: Yeah. There’s a Dilbert cartoon where he’s talking about “Project
Caribou,” and I thought it was a funny name, so I used it.
Livingston: Tell me about one of the darkest days of...

ever a point where you worried that your project would get canned?
Buchheit: All the time. Again, it was sort of a much earlier time than now
where it fits in nicely. It was really kind of the first thing that diverged from the
simple idea of web search. Even Groups is still basically search—it’s just search
over public usenet posts.
So it took a while for people to get used to the idea of something different.
You have to remember that the situation between Google and Yahoo was different
at that time....

little latency. If a document doesn’t get added for a few minutes, it’s not a big
deal. So at a system design level, that actually makes a huge difference, even
though it’s a seemingly small difference when you describe it.
Livingston: It seems like one advantage of having a startup-like project within a
big company is that you have access to all its resources. Tell me about some
other valuable things.
Buchheit: I think the people are the biggest resource. There are really smart
people around, so you could just go talk to...

a machine that’s down, what do you do? You have to be able to respond to
everything that goes wrong very quickly, so that’s challenging.
I was actually surprised to some extent at how positively some of the things
we did were received. We were pretty nervous about some of our features. The
idea of doing the whole thing in JavaScript—internally a lot of people were very
unsure about that, but I think that our users loved it. It actually worked better
than we expected it to. We were pretty nervous about it, because...