Why didn’t Google develop the Gmailuploader or Gspace?

I just met Jonathan Rosenberg, the head of Product Management at Google, and told him about the Gmailuploader, the tool we have developed at FON allowing you to send old emails to Gmail so when you open a new Gmail account it’s not empty and you can search them. He loved it. But then I was surprised and asked him why is it that Gmail does not have that functionality. I said that I would not mind giving Google the Gmailuploader as a gift, and all Google had to do in return would be to ad a little thank you note to FON for having developing it. His answer was a roll of eyes that I totally understood. If FON has so many projects to make our services better, the list of Google’s must be endless — that’s what the roll of eyes meant. And it was nice to see the human side of Jonathan. Nobody, even the person who probably has the biggest army of coders in the world at his command, can tackle everything. What I love about Google and have also seen with FON is that they are so open to collaborations.

After Jonathan, I met with many other Google people and we shared other developments like Gspace, the app that mirrors your computer on the internet using Gmail as the backoffice. And while some people have been telling me that Google was going to kill it because storing documents is not the original intention of Gmail, I found that the Google managers are totally open to new apps that make the lives of internet users around the world better (especially if some people use Gspace to empty Microsoft and send those documents to Google :). And hopefully this week we will introduce a new tool that blends Skype and Google functionalities….stayed tune!