How Gmail destroyed Outlook.
By Farhad Manjoo
Posted Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009, at 5:52 PM ET
As of this week, Gmail has reached perfection: You no longer have to
be online to read or write messages. Desktop programs like Microsoft
Outlook have always been able to access your old mail. There is a
certain bliss to this; if you've got a pile of letters that demand
well-composed, delicate responses (say you're explaining to your boss
why you ordered that $85,000 rug), unplugging the Internet can be the
fastest way to get things done. That's why offline access is a killer
feature—it destroys your last remaining reason for suffering through a
desktop e-mail program.
Google's not alone in providing this option. Microsoft's Windows
Live Mail, Yahoo's Zimbra, and the mail app made by the Web startup
Zoho, among other services, also provide some measure of untethered
e-mail access. For now, Google calls this addition "experimental"—you've
got to turn it on explicitly, and the company is asking users to report
any bugs—but I found it easy to set up and a delight to use.
To get offline access, you first need to download and install a
small program called Google
Gears (except if you're using Google's Chrome browser, which comes
with Gears built in). Then, after you enable Gmail's offline
capability, the system will download two months of your most recent
messages, which should take 30 minutes to an hour. Now you're good to
go: When you're offline, type www.gmail.com into your browser, log
in—yes, Gears enables you to log in even when you don't have a Web
connection—and there's your e-mail. Though I work from home and rarely
find myself away from a hot Wi-Fi connection, I shut off my router and
parked myself on my couch for about an hour yesterday. I loaded up
Gmail on my laptop, and it responded seamlessly—I could read, search
through, and respond to any message I'd received during the last two
months, all through the familiar Web interface. Eureka! I'll never
again be mailless on a plane, a subway, or anyplace else where you
don't have the Web but do have a lot of time to kill.
Now that Gmail has bested the Outlooks of the world, it's a good
time to assess the state of desktop software. There are some things
that work better on your computer (your music app, your photo editor,
your spreadsheets), and there are some that work better online
(everything else). Over the last few years, we've seen many programs
shifting from the first category to the second—now you can get
spreadsheets and photo editors online, though they're still not as good
as programs hosted on your computer. But e-mail has crossed the line
completely. Hosted services like Gmail are now the most powerful and
convenient way to grapple with a daily onslaught of mail. If you're
still tied to a desktop app—whether Outlook, the Mac's Mail program, or
anything else that sees your local hard drive, rather than a Web
server, as its brain—then you're doing it wrong.
The shift has been a long time coming. On July 4, 1996, Sabeer
Bhatia and Jack Smith, two techies who met while working at Apple,
launched Hotmail, the first free e-mail service on the Web. The date
wasn't accidental—from the beginning, Web-based e-mail sought to
liberate people from the strictures imposed by traditional providers
(ISPs, universities, and employers, all of whom required some official
affiliation before they gave you an e-mail address). Hotmail would give
an inbox to anyone—you could even sign up for multiple addresses—and
pretty soon it was impossible to find a soul who didn't e-mail.
But it was a terrible hassle to actually use Hotmail—which Microsoft
purchased in 1997—or the rival e-mail systems built by Yahoo, AOL, and
the various other Web portals that dominated the last tech boom. Back
then, Web-based e-mail was a great idea executed poorly. Internet
connections, Web browsers, and Web-design technologies were slow and
flaky; you waited an eternity to load up a message, you could easily
lose a draft of a long e-mail if something went amiss with your modem,
and you had a limited amount of storage space. Web e-mail was a redoubt
of amateurs. If you were serious about your inbox, you kept it on your
desktop.
Desktop e-mail presented its own challenges, though. People who were
serious about e-mail tended to archive all their messages. But desktop
e-mail apps performed poorly when overloaded with mail; Outlook, for
instance, crawled to halt if you stuffed it with just a few tens of
thousands of messages, which for some people is only a few months'
worth. What's more, keeping all your mail in one place was both
annoying and not very safe. You couldn't easily check your messages on
multiple computers. And what if you wanted to switch to a new computer?
Or what if a power surge crashed your drive? As a journalist working
during the Internet bust, my particular worry was getting a pink slip.
If my boss suddenly asked me to turn in my company-provided laptop, all
my e-mail—both professional and personal correspondence going back
years—would be gone.
By the time Gmail launched in summer 2004, I was desperate for an
alternative to Outlook. (I had tried pretty much every other desktop
e-mail app.) From the moment I logged on, I found it liberating.
Gmail's interface was quick and intuitive, unlike any other major
online service at the time. (Gmail did borrow some design ideas from Oddpost,
an ahead-of-its-time Web e-mail app developed in 2002; Yahoo bought
Oddpost in 2004.) Gmail was the first to display multiple messages on
the same subject as threaded conversations—a design idea that
user-interface experts had long been saying would make e-mail easier to
use. Switching to Gmail also freed me from worrying about how I
preserved my mail—Google, whose servers are much more secure than my
own computer, was taking care of backups for me.
What separates Gmail from its rivals is a basic design philosophy:
It's built for power e-mailers. Late last year I visited the Gmail team
at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. Keith Coleman, Gmail's
program manager, told me that from the beginning, Google aimed to build
something suitable for people who got a ton of mail—because in the
future, everyone will get a ton of mail. Gmail's main features are all
catnip for folks who find themselves buried under the weight of their
inbox. There's a search engine worthy of the Google name, a slate of
keyboard shortcuts that make organizing your messages brutally
efficient, and a crowdsourced spam detector that keeps out unwanted
messages. Best of all, Gmail is fast—you can switch between messages
and folders quicker than you can in any other e-mail program, even
desktop-based systems. Coleman told me that the team is constantly
measuring and tweaking the responsiveness of its interface. (The
software gives coders a readout of how long, on average, various tasks
take to complete.) The Gmail managers are also gaga over user-interface
tests: Before instituting any major feature, developers bring users
into a whiz-bang lab outfitted with cameras and eye-tracking software
to see how people react to the new stuff.
Lately Coleman and his staff have been improving Gmail at a
breakneck pace. They added a way to let people chat by voice and video,
and they put out "themes"
that personalize the appearance of your e-mail screen. Last summer,
they launched Gmail
Labs, a repository of add-on programs that run alongside Gmail.
Offline access is one of these many Labs features; you can also add a to-do
list, buttons to send people quick canned
responses, a mini-program for sending text
messages to cell phones, and a "gadget" for monitoring
your Google Calendar and Google Docs from your e-mail. All these
add-ons were created by Google programmers, but Coleman says that Gmail
is also experimenting with letting outside developers add stuff. Google
seems to be trying to create more than just a great e-mail program;
with all these add-ons, Gmail is becoming a sort of e-mail platform
whose users benefit from the best ideas in mail management.
And that gets to what's so exciting about being a Gmail user right
now. The app keeps getting better. You might say that's true of desktop
systems, too; Outlook is not as clunky as it was five years ago, and,
no doubt, it'll be better five years from now. But so will Gmail—and
because it's online, you'll get those improvements faster, and without
having to install any software. Now that you can use Gmail
anywhere—even when you're beyond the reach of broadband—there's no
longer any reason to suffer.
Farhad
Manjoo is Slate's technology
columnist and the author of True
Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail
him at farhad.manjoo@slate.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2210090/
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