GMAIL
Analyzing Gmail Development through the New Product Development (NPD) Process and Success Drivers
Gmail is often given as a shining example of Google’s involvement with intrapreneurship. With their legendary 20% time policy allowing employees to utilise part of their work hours for personal projects, Paul Buchheit took that chance to create Gmail, which went on to become an important piece of Google’s lineup. It is probably one of the most notorious and successful intrapreneurship examples in the world.
Google’s Gmail, launched on the 1st April 2004, was the first true landmark service to emerge from Google since its search engine debuted in 1998.
Paul Buchheit started his career at Google in 1999, becoming the company’s 23rd employee. He had been working in the development of a web-based email that could also provide a search engine within the already existing email service. However, the idea to include a search engine within Google’s email service was doubted strongly by many within the company. Most thought it was a bad idea from both a product and strategic point of view. In addition, there was worry amongst company brass about stretching Google too far beyond search, making the service publicly available.
But these worries dissipated when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Founders of Google, decided to support Buchheit with his project
The Outcomes
Gmail didn’t just blow away Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the main free webmail services of the day, but it went on to become a dominant email service.
Today Gmail has reportedly more than 1.5 billion global active users, it has gone from a small experiment to becoming a key service of Google’s product offering.
Moreover, Gmail, and the way online advertising worked with emails, eventually helped shape the Google AdSense advertising programme and set the foundations for Google’s online advertising service to generate $147 billion in revenue in 2020.