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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

> To invent products like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds run wild.

A cute meme that people like to repeat because it 'sounds right', not really accurate. Gmail was someone's pet project, Earth was purchased, and Translate was a boring statistical analysis program for 10 years. I mean, really, how "wild" does your mind have to be to write a crappy CRUD app or design an algorithm?

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You're being downvoted but I agree with you. Most of the work here at Google is frankly of the very boring day to day software engineering slog -- bisecting crashes, fixing emergency issues, reading and writing long documents. Coddled geniuses doesn't really describe how things get done. It's more like, keep the geniuses (or not-geniuses) coddled, so they don't get annoyed with doing what is really not-very-sexy work :-)

To me, Google Maps/Earth seems to be one of the most advanced web apps in the world.

Gmail and Translate are, indeed, not extremely exciting.

At the time Gmail was introduced, it's hard to overstate how groundbreaking and influential it was. Totally raised the bar for web apps everywhere by making effective use of XHR, which at that time was hardly known even to web developers. An absurdly large amount of storage space (1GB when Hotmail was 10MB, IIRC?), fast and effective search. There's a reason Google was the most loved and respected company in tech for years, and IMHO Gmail was a huge part of that.

But does it really take a coddled genius whose mind runs wild to develop a modern web app and give it lots of storage space? Or was it just a cool idea that a team of regular-old software developers decided to implement?

Lots of teams of regular-old software developers have done cool stuff over the years, but in this case, it happened to be a coddled genius. At least that is the story we've consistently been told over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit

I'm pretty sure there were plenty of geniuses on the Hotmail team at the time, too--maybe they weren't being coddled enough in the Ballmer era! ;)

Not sure why your comment is being downvoted. It's completely accurate and welcomed counterpoint to a common misconception.

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