Failure is the key to success; every mistake teaches us something. – Morihei Ueshiba Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Contrary to common belief, Gmail was not born out of Google's legendary 20% of the time. The creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, had already started working on personal email software in 1996. These were the days before Hotmail, and Paul had been dissatisfied with email for a while: He was in college and had to go back to his dorm room every time he wanted to check his email. Buchheit thought, “This is so stupid. I should be able to check it anywhere." He had some ideas and wanted to create a web-based email. However, Buchheit wasn't entirely sure what he was doing and didn't know exactly where his haphazard project was going He eventually got bored, so despite having an interest in email, the service never fully came to fruition. After a few years, Buchheit joined Google in 1999 as its 23rd employee. In 2001, Larry Page asked Buchheit if he wanted to create some kind of email or personalization product. Larry Page and Sergey Brin simply said "We think this is an interesting area" and left Buchheit to deal with it. Google's founders gave no specific instructions or guidance Email in the early 2000s were clunky desktop programs that hadn't evolved much since their inception. The interfaces were slow and webmail storage was terrible. Hotmail offered users a paltry 2 MB of storage, while Yahoo offered users a slightly better 4 MB. One of Buchheit's first projects at Google was Google Groups. By 2001, Groups had acquired Usenet's large database of newsfeeds, articles, discussions, and messages. Usenet had been one of the oldest widely used computer network communications systems, with archives dating back to 1980. Google Groups had essentially indexed all of Usenet's content. Since Buchheit already knew the group's code, he simply pointed to the group's powerful search function on his email instead of Usenet. In one day, the first version of Gmail was created: an email search engine. Buchheit's email search engine initially operated on a server at his desk. And he only searched Buchheit's email. Even then it was useful for other Google engineers, as they had many of the same emails as Paul. Google's work culture at the time was heavily dependent on email, and Buchheit received 500 emails every day. There was an email search request. Buchheit's colleagues immediately requested this feature for themselves, so they could search their own email. Buchheit then added several never-before-seen features that set Gmail apart from its competitors and which have since spread to other email clients: Large storage. 1 GB in 2004 represented a huge amount of storage space, compared to the 2-4 MB generally available on the market. Gmail was the first web-based email provider to introduce autocomplete. People were sending emails so fast that autocomplete saved them the hassle of remembering email addresses. Gmail allowed users to archive emails instead of deleting them. Buchheit found that users were deleting emails because they were running out of space or to organize their inboxes that would become unmanageable if they kept all their emails. But these!