Coding Horror: Overnight Success: It Takes Years
Paul Buchheit, the original lead developer of GMail, notes that the success of GMail was a long time in coming:
“We starting working on Gmail in August 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints. Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps “reboot” it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 — two and a half years after starting work on it — many people inside of Google were predicting doom. The product was too weird, and nobody wants to change email services. I was told that we would never get a million users.”
