Back in 2004, email seemed like a solved problem. But an engineer at Google had different ideas...

[00:00] Google almost never released Gmail, [00:02] because people internally thought it was [00:04] unnecessary. Back then, email was [00:06] already solved. You had inboxes, [00:08] folders, attachments. What else do you [00:10] need? But one engineer at Google called [00:12] Paul started building an email app on [00:14] the side. It was all part of a 20% [00:16] project. Basically, something Google [00:17] employees worked on as a side part of [00:20] their job. And his idea was simple. What [00:22] about instead of deleting emails, you [00:24] can search with them, kind of like you [00:26] search all your folders. This sounds [00:28] normal now, of course, but back in 2004 [00:30] this was quite the enormous shift. [00:32] Especially when Gmail launched with 1 GB [00:37] of storage. Now, this back then was [00:38] insane. Other email providers offered [00:41] megabytes, but Gmail was offering [00:43] gigabytes. Well, 1 GB to be precise. [00:46] People literally thought this was an [00:48] April Fool's joke, but no, this was [00:50] essentially the start of something [00:52] insane. Gmail was born.