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 also looking forward to integrating chat/IM. We didn’t have time to
include chat in the original launch, but it was in the early prototypes because
we very much wanted to integrate chat and email—they belong together. So
one thing we did was to think about email from a chat perspective, as though
we were adding email to chat instead of the other way around. Of course chat is
very much conversation-oriented—nobody thinks about individual chat messages.
So the conversation view also came out of that—for a while we even formatted
the email to look more like a chat conversation.
Livingston: It sounds like you really took the user’s perspective when you
designed Gmail.
Buchheit: Absolutely, that’s very much how it developed. Every time we would
get irritated by some little problem, or one of the users would say, “I have this
problem, it isn’t working for me,” we’d just spend time thinking about it, looking
at what the underlying problems are and how we can come up with solutions
to make it better for them.
Paul Buchheit 165
Livingston: How big was your group by the time it launched? Only three
of you?
Buchheit: There were a lot more people at that point. It depends which people
you count, but it was about a dozen.
Livingston: Was there a time then when you said, “We need more programmers
to get this going”?
Buchheit: I was always asking for more people. We still ask for more people.
There’s so much more we could do. The product is nice, but every day there are
things that I find that I want to change. But when you’re operating a big service,
it also takes a lot of work just to deal with growth and improvements. A lot of
the improvements are invisible. For example, I think we added 43 new languages.
You don’t necessarily notice that as an English user, but for most of the
world, it’s a big deal. There’s just so much work as the product becomes big and
needs to support millions of users.
Livingston: When you launched, had you already had users?
Buchheit: Literally from day one, we had users internally. One nice thing about

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