Today at the Gmail Behind The Scenes panel at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, key team members of the Gmail team revealed the true secret of the service: Shit umbrellas.
Product manager Todd Jackson made the humorous revelation when explaining how the Gmail team works as a group of about 100 people, the vast majority of which are engineers. “You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella,” Jackson says.
What he means by that is that as a product with hundreds of millions of users (and a company with thousands of employees) there’s a lot of stuff constantly being hurled at the team — as a shit umbrella, the product managers protect the engineers from getting distracted. It’s not enough to be a “shit funnel” where they would pass some of the junk down to engineers, they need to fully protect the engineers.
This sentiment was echoed by Edward Ho, who is known as “Mr. Buzz,” as he’s the one who built up the Google Buzz team (a sub-unit of the Gmail team). Ho noted his hatred for unnecessary meetings, and has made sure that when the Buzz team needs to have them, they are based around demos, not talking about things. “It’s all about what you’ve done,” Ho says.
Some other interesting notes about Gmail:
- The original invites system wasn’t a marketing ploy, it was simply an engineering decision to make sure they could scale
- There’s a 30-1 engineers to products managers ratio in the Gmail team — it’s certainly one of the biggest ratios at Google
- The Gmail team is spread over a few offices around the world (including Zurich), it used to be more, but they consolidated to help the product.
- There are “hundreds of million of users” — the third-largest email provider
- In India, Gmail is the number one email provider
- Gmail is growing fasters internationally than in the U.S.
- Gmail is available in 53 languages
- Internally, the Google Buzz team was known as “Team Taco Town” after an SNL skit
- Google uses Gmail internally (obviously), switched over from Microsoft Outlook at launch (about 6 years ago)
- Gmail is slow for some users mainly because they have a ton of emails saved. A fix for that is coming soon
- Most of gmail is written in Java, JavaScript, C++
- There are several hundred thousands lines of javascript in Gmail – one of the biggest in the world
- No new feature can launch for Gmail that adds latency to the product
[photo: flickr/atomicjeep]
you say e-mails “saved” in the inbox not archived or both?
Achievement unlocked: Pickiest annoying flab post of the year.
Who cares?
both. more here http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/
And they said they are going to make it possible for you to merge gmail accounts and GAFYD (google apps for your domain) accounts for the purpose accessing services like google reader.
I probably wrote that poorly. The point being that you won’t have to have a separate account on gmail if you have a GAFYD account to access stuff.
Which would be really nice.
This is possible, albeit clunky, as it is. You can create a Google Account with your Google Apps email, and use it to log in to all Google services.
Downsides are that when you click on Gmail, it asks you to set up a Gmail ID and Calendar, etc. are totally separate from your Google Apps calendar.
A cleaner meshing between Google Account and Google Apps would be great, it’s one of the main features I’ve been waiting for.
Interesting to see how it’s done…
…but here comes some more flying s**t…please implement delayed send – to reply to emails in the dead of night (when millions have the bandwidth to do so) and have them send in the next ‘normal office hours’ window so clients/colleagues/friends/the world don’t judge the email by the freakish timestamp.
This would be a great way to address the drop-off usage that must occur in the dead of night. That’s at least 33% extra advertising right?
They are forcing https on all accounts soon. That’s a new feature that does add latency.
Awesome post. I love reading this kind of thing. Thanks!
“Gmail is growing fasters internationally than in the U.S.”
Per cap ? Or just by account numbers.
Is it adj for when it launched in that nations language ?
I hate statements like these.
Any reason why Google doesn’t just provide Google App users access to Reader and Wave?
Why maintain 2 accounts to access largely redundant apps?
The only request I’ve ever had with gmail since day 1 is to *not* group emails by subject.
> “Mr. Buzz” noted his hatred for unnecessary
> meetings…”It’s all about what you’ve done”
And the success that was the Buzz launch means we should all hope to emulate this man?
Fascinating. “Mr. Buzz” doesn’t like to have meetings to “talk about things” unless its a demo to “show what you’ve done.” That’s a real time-saver, eliminating unnecessary planning.
“What did your team do yesterday, Mr. Buzz?”
“Here’s a demo that shows how we dumped Buzz on all GMail users, connected it to all of their private Google services, and got rid of the obsolete concept of privacy. We had a vote, and the engineers decided it was a good idea.”
“Oh shit. I don’t think we have a big enough umbrella this time! We might have to borrow Microsoft’s again.”
Frankly the product — like many others at Google — reeks of being engineering-driven. And sorry programmers, it’s not a huge problem. You don’t need your PhDs and BigTable and the dude who “designed” Python (har!) to sort small text files by date.
It’s a mail client for chrissakes, a fairly well-understood entity at this point. And the arrogance of the Gmail team combined with the ugliness of the product manages to make the kids in Redmond look like customer-focused aesthetic visionaries by comparison. Now that’s a technology-driven achievement.
I have a hunch Ms. Mayer’s kitchen is far better designed than the products she supervises. If not, she’d be missing a few fingers and burned over 70% of her body after an ongoing series of engineering mishaps involving the fryer and knife block.
Or maybe she’s just looking for her carrots, which are buried somewhere in a flat list of the other 450 vegetable-related messages in an email thread foolishly titled “veggies”?
I don’t know about the shit and the umbrella, but I do know that “free shit on web” plus “marginally useful service” equals “lots of users stuck in shit product.”
The glacial pace of improvements wasn’t exactly what we were promised with all this fancy web stuff, now, were we?
Last I checked, TechCrunch writes a story every time Twitter’s CSS drops a dot or Tumblr’s DNS goes silly for a few hours. Imagine what would happen if either service ever actually improved marginally?
Haha – hilarious. +1
Well spoken Tim.
Sorting small text files by date is easy. Sorting seventy-five-gazillion of them every millisecond probably requires engineers.
any video link??
Didn’t know Google regarded customer feedback as sh*t.
Wow, makes me think more and more about MS Exchange vs. Google Apps – it’s clear that annoying MS is actually light years ahead. Seriously, Gmail is SO over-rated! When are they going to learn that “free” and “web” doesn’t equal “productive”?
Oh, and it took them this long to announce a joining of Gmail with Google Apps?! Maybe if they just sat down with 2 users for 2 minutes they would have seen that as an important feature!
@ Tim Jenison: absolutely hilarious, and spot-on.
Ultimately: Hubris fueled by a cash cow plus engineers feelings of superiority lead to horrible product development. Google has little or nothing to crow about.
Google does two things incredibly well: Search/Auction, and systems scaling.
I develop using Google App Engine, which leverages the latter competitive advantage Google enjoys. It should be a killer, take-over the world product, and could be a big driver for revenue and profit for Google. Yet it is so poorly, yes even arrogantly delivered by Google’s young Gods of Engineering. Why should I be terrified rather than delighted by by choice vs. AWS, or Azure?? (GAE has some compelling features, which were still enough to win my biz, justing hoping guys like these bozos aren’t the norm for the GAE team. Should’nt be too hard to port to AWS or Azure if my bet doesn’t pay off.)
I felt a great sense of loss for society with MSFT taking a similar route leveraging Windows and Office. So many hugely talented people thinking they are part of an incredible scaled environment changing the world, when they really did nothing except inculcate an environment of customer-needs deafness.
Google hasn’t changed SHIT for so long now. GMail is a few good ideas added to an existing product. Its great market win was all the free space Google offered early on (again leveraging G’s great scalability skills). Yet these hubris-filled bozos talk about shit umbrellas
Googlers: You should have several new, fantastic products by now. Your just so full of hubris, you can’t figure out how to listen to customers so as to understand what they truly need. THAT is the skill a product manager brings to the team. It is incredibly hard to distill consumers needs into revolutionary new products. Based on what I’m hearing here — it is NEVER going to happen. Just more ad stuff from the big G: just like MSFT milking its cash cows.
Anyway, back to your code Googlers. Give us more Wave’s and Buzz’s . Wake me when you really delight someone other than your engineering peers.
Gmail released several lab functions to the general public. Fine, except they never fixed even the basic problem many people, including myself, brought to their attention ( or lack of attention ). Try this:
Fire up Gmail
Compose an email to some other email address with the subject Test
Put in the body “See attached”. That brings up a warning that you have not attached anything. Good. Now try “File attached” no warning, the email just gets sent.
The shit umbrella is for spittle from the drivel of people like Tim Jenison who have *no idea* what they’re talking about and the people who think his type of nonsense is “spot-on”.
Characterizing something like Gmail as “sort[ing] small text files” is just silly… or flame bait.
Gmail is amazing. Need to lot more keyboard shortcuts.
Wow. I also made a snide comment isolated to a very specific mistake, but all of this Google bashing is beyond absurd. Do you guys realize that while you’re nitpicking nearly irrelevant issues, Google is building THE platform of the future that is going to be the center of most software delivery models? Do you realize that it sets into play an organic, systemically self-evolving, market-driven system that can effectively address every issue you’ve raised? And that at its core is a strategic play that is absolute genius?
It’s as if this crowd was looking at the location where an advanced city one-thousand times the size of New York was being built underwater by newly invented self-replicating nanomachines, but the only thing visible was some buoyant scaffolding with a dozen small buildings that originally housed the oceanographic scientists and engineers who scouted out the area, drew up the plans, and deployed the machines. Then one of you naively began sneering about “that pathetic excuse for a town that some idiots built on the ocean,” and others followed up with observations like “someone said this was the city of the future, but no one would live there unless they were dirt poor or mentally ill,” “my brother’s construction company could build those shacks in a day,” and the ultimate in keen insights, “those houses aren’t even painted!” While you were all sharing your erudition with each other, rapidly rising sea levels were swallowing up every surface on earth.
The sapling is already public. Do yourself a favor and catch up on recent events, dig into the details, and if you have any decency, give credit where credit is due.
Gmail is growing fasters internationally than in the U.S
“Gmail is slow for some users mainly because they have a ton of emails saved. A fix for that is coming soon”
Ah finally! I bought into the ‘never through anything away’ and got burned big time by it; my inbox was unusable for months and I complained every day to ’support’. In the end they helped me out nicely, but the only solution was to delete a lot of my mail. I paid for extra storage which became useless after deleting all those mails.