It was twenty years ago today…

The Verge has published an article looking back at two decades of Gmail, the launch of which was announced with an appropriately lighthearted press release on April 1st. The free service (when all its equivalents were paid) became available on May 1,2004, and included a gigabyte of storage, when 15 or 20 megabytes was the norm. Having attained dominance of online searches, the company decided to consolidate its position and provide its own email service.

Impressed by the superiority of Gmail, several of my colleagues at IE Business School were given access to Gmail on the same day of its launch and choose the names we wanted because we knew the Country Manager of Google in Spain at the time, Miguel de Reina.

Little did we know where all this would lead. While The Verge article focuses on the pros and cons of Gmail, it overlooks the most important dimensional change that Gmail meant for Google, for the web and for everyone: Google stopped being a simple search service that we used without leaving anything more than a little information about our IP address and the characteristics of our computer, to become a service we had to log in to and provid proof of our identity.

The impact of this would change the internet forever. This was clearly the best email account of its time — and arguably still is, twenty years later — but when we began to…