but it got people thinking because it proved that it was possible, and that it
wasn’t too hard because I was able to do it in less than a day. After that, other
people took over and did all the hard work of making it into a real product.
Livingston: You have done two groundbreaking things at Google.
Buchheit: Probably. I’ve done a lot of random things. Mostly what I do doesn’t
turn into anything, because I like to just try out ideas and a lot of them don’t go
anywhere.
Livingston: So you work on Gmail for a day, you can see you’re on to something—
then what happened?
Buchheit: For quite a while, it was just myself; and then another person,
Sanjeev Singh, started working on it. But switching projects here, especially
back then, wasn’t easy. It wasn’t like one day, you’re suddenly on a new project.
So he still ended up spending a lot of his time on enterprise search, which he
was working on at the time. It was quite a while before Sanjeev could really
spend most of his time on Gmail. So it was pretty slow for a long time.
It was mostly just me; then me and Sanjeev; then later on another person,
Jing Lim, started. It was a very slow kind of progression. And people were still a
little bit uncertain about the whole idea of doing something as different as
email.
Livingston: When was the moment when you said, “This is big and we’re going
to launch this”?
Buchheit: Several days after launch! It was a big project. Sometimes it seemed
as though we weren’t ever going to make it out.
Livingston: Tell me about some of the most challenging parts.
Buchheit: There’s a lot that was challenging about it, just because it’s very big,
for one thing. We gave everyone a gigabyte of storage to start with. At the time,
the standard was around 2 or 4 megabytes.
A lot of people actually didn’t think that was real. They thought it was a
joke—partially because we launched on April 1.
They also thought it wasn’t possible. It can be a little bit tricky, because it’s
a lot of data if you actually do the math: you have millions of users and they all
have a lot of data, and then, to make the system really reliable, you need to keep
several copies of the data, backups and everything like that. It requires a lot of
research. It’s a lot of machines and a lot of systems to make that all work without
requiring an army of people to maintain the system and keep it running.
There’s a very complicated system problem there.
We were also doing a lot of things that were new to Google. And I guess this