Today is April Fools 2024, and companies are all getting ready to post their April Fool’s jokes on Twitter. However, one company has a big piece of news, but this is no joke. Gmail just turned 20 years old today.
Though this may be painful, think back to the early 2000s when getting an email account was as tedious as buying a house. Back then, email accounts would cost money and they would have a very limited amount of storage. However, in came Google with a product that solved most problems associated with email accounts back in that day. Google introduced Gmail back on April 1st, 2004, and it very quickly became a success.
Gmail turns 20 years old
Back in those days, if you wanted to sign up for an email client to keep in contact with other people in businesses you would have had to pay. Obviously, people don’t often want to pay for services, so getting an email client back in the day had a pretty high barrier to entry. Sure, there were definitely some free clients available. However, they were very limited in how many emails could be stored.
Well, Google swept in, like always, and brought an accessible product that everyone could use. Gmail is Google’s main email client, and alleviated some issues that plagued people wanting an email address. It introduced a free account, and it gave people a whole gigabyte of storage. That might not seem like a lot by today’s standards, but back in 2004, most email clients offered about 15MB of emails.
Gmail continued to grow in popularity and gather users as the years went on. After a short eight years. It became the top email client in the world with over 400 million users.
Gmail going forward
Fast forward to today; Gmail has about 1.2 billion users worldwide. While 1.2 billion users don’t quite equate to 1.2 billion people (in many cases, people have multiple Gmail accounts), it still shows that Gmail has been doing something right over the years.
Having a Gmail account automatically gives you certain services such as Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, Chat, and many many more. It’s a testament to how Google was able to revolutionize the email market and set the stage for other companies to follow suit.
At this point, we have no idea what Google plans on doing over the next 20 years. What we know is that it’s going to be big, it’s going to be impressive, and it’s going to involve a lot of AI.
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