Founders at Work.pdf

164 Founders at Work
in web search you go out and you crawl the web and index that data and the
latencies are different. We go fetch a page and it gets searchable a little bit later.
But in email, everything has to be instant, and of course you can’t lose any of
the data either.
It turns out to make a big difference in how you build things. A lot of the
strategies that you might use for web search can be problematic when you
apply them to email at a systems level, simply because you need to make everything
so fast. It has to happen right away. You can’t say, “Well, we receive email
and then in half an hour it will appear.” Which is actually how it worked in one
of my early versions—the email would come in and I had this little script that
would incorporate it into the index, but it generated this long lag, and so that
wasn’t really great.
All of those little details add up to creating a lot of challenges, just to get it
all right. The JavaScript was a big deal as well, because at the time that we first
started doing the interface in JavaScript, most people thought of JavaScript as a
tool for pop-up advertising and other obnoxious things like that. This was
before the whole Ajax thing, so a lot of people were pretty skeptical that
JavaScript could work reliably. Not without justification—it is a little bit tricky
because if you do things wrong, you’ll crash the browser.
So making all of that work and work really well took some learning and figuring
out the right techniques and where to draw the line about which features
are a good idea and which aren’t.
Livingston: Which was your favorite feature?
Buchheit: That’s hard to pin down. Actually one of the things that we added
very early on, which at this point seems pretty obvious, but it turned out to be
really nice, is the autocomplete when you type in the email addresses. Once you
have it, it just seems so obvious. “Why wouldn’t you have autocomplete?”
Livingston: This was a first?
Buchheit: None of the other web mail providers had autocomplete. Now you
don’t really even think about it, but it makes a big difference. You can send
email so fast and you don’t have to remember the addresses. To my knowledge,
we were the first web mail provider to do it. Desktop products would have
things like that sometimes, but no web mail was doing that at the time.
Livingston: Was it always your plan to archive everything and not delete emails
and have the massive storage needs?
Buchheit: You can delete email. The idea was that there’s valuable information
in email and we thought, “Why would you perform these actions?” For deleting,
we found three or four reasons why you might delete things. One is that
you’re running out of space—which was the most common reason for deleting
things, because you only had a 2-megabyte quota. We said, “If we give people
enough storage, then they won’t run into that problem.”
The second reason was that people would delete things just because email
quickly became unmanageable if they didn’t. So we said, “We’ve got search,
we’ll try to make that efficient.” I can handle—I don’t know how many millions