Authors: Douglas Edwards
Ouch. That hurt. Funny stuff on the homepage felt awfully like online branding to me. I went back to the drawing board.
"Let's see. The message should be positive. Improbable, but not obviously impossible. Hmm. What if Google were so good it delivered results before you even searched?"
Thirty seconds later, I was typing a description of "Ante-Temporal search," a breakthrough development that anticipated user requests. The tone was heavily geekish, but Susan liked it. Sergey thought it was overdone (akin to the pope saying you're overly religious), but encouragingly, he said it had potential. "Maybe you could make it more like this site I saw about kitty porn?" he asked.
Sergey asked Susan to include engineer and bodily-function satirist Ray Sidney in our discussions to make sure the joke ended up with plenty of funny and sufficient tech cred. I dragged Ray and Paul Bucheit into a conference room to brainfart jokes. In that redolent atmosphere, Ray pinned the name "MentalPlex" on our new mind-reading technology. That settled, I hashed out the text for a link on the homepage, a dozen error messages that would be displayed randomly if someone entered a query in the MentalPlex search box, and an FAQ explaining how to visualize a search so MentalPlex could detect it.
Q: I am unable to visualize clicking and have to use my finger to activate the mouse.
A: Click visualization takes practice. Try pushing the mouse button with your eyebrow, then gradually increase the distance between your eye and the mouse.
Marissa pointed out that with our newly launched foreign-language interfaces, we could extend the joke beyond English. "One of the error messages should say that MentalPlex has detected foreign thoughts," she suggested, "and then we can translate the interface text on the results page into German."
In what would become an April Fools' tradition, our webmaster Karen White worked at warp speed right up to the deadline to get the final images and copy in place. We wanted maximum exposure in all time zones, so we would send MentalPlex out at eight p.m. on March 31 and keep it on the site throughout the following day.
Karen pushed the last of the files at 7:55 on Friday night. Soon Google users would see a spinning cartoon spiral on our homepage inviting them to try MentalPlex. I was relieved we'd made the deadline. I was also terrified.
Humor is subjective. Done poorly, it just comes across as pathetic. I didn't want my first attempt at instilling personality into our brand to be branded lame by the digerati, but I also didn't want it to be so much of an in-joke that only geeks would get it. It would be bad enough to tell a joke to millions of people and have no one laugh, but if MentalPlex bombed, I was sure Sergey would just hand all future fun stuff to engineers, condemning me to write product spec sheets and error messages for all eternity.
As soon as Karen hit Submit on the push, I started compulsively refreshing my inbox to check for feedback from users. I had a sense that my entire career was resting on whether or not I had nailed the punch line for this one stupid joke, which felt weaker and more juvenile by the minute.
At 8:01 the first email arrived. "Google is great!" was the header. The user liked the way we played with our homepage. More emails started trickling in. People were surprised. They didn't think search engines had a sense of humor. They liked it. They were ☺. LOL. ROFL. ROFLMAO. They really, really liked it. I let the glow of their adoration wash over me from the screen of my laptop. There were a few confused souls who didn't get it at all, and some who felt we should forget comedy and stick to searching, and a handful who threatened to leave if we put graphics on our homepage permanently. One guy who said he was "incipiently epileptic" believed our spinning spiral graphic could induce seizures. But these sour notes were drowned by the chorus of hosannas sounding steadily over the next few hours. It was a love fest of praise and joy and Lo! Was that inaudible rhythm the music of the spheres thrumming softly in the heavens?
"Turn it off. It thinks I'm German." The off-key refrain caught my ear.
"I found MentalPlex mildly amusing, but the different languages on the results page make it harder to use. The joke gets old very quickly."
Discordant voices sang about confusion and annoyance. They swelled from a hoarse whisper to a shrill harangue to a roaring cacophony of insistent outrage that could not be ignored. By ten p.m., it was painfully clear that for many in Google's global audience, jokes about Germany and mind control were just not funny. I emailed Susan, who was still at the office monitoring feedback, and suggested we get rid of the German message. She had already identified the problem and called Sergey. He okayed removing the German error message and the linked results page. Okay. A minor hitch resolved.
Except, it was Friday night. All the engineering staff were with Sergey, washing away the week's woes at Zibbibos, a trendy restaurant twenty minutes away in downtown Palo Alto. No one in the office was authorized to make the change. I sat at home watching more and more messages complaining about Germans, German thoughts, and German jokes drop into my mailbox and explode. Little ice balls formed on the back of my neck, then rolled down my spine.
A half hour passed. Then another. We were taking a pounding on email. Finally, the offensive German ground to a halt. Thanks to some anonymous engineer, no more unwanted German results confused our users. Now our unwanted results were in Portuguese. The engineers thought the joke was just too funny to eliminate entirely, so they simply shifted the interface to another language. Users didn't like German? Fine, we'll give them something else.
"
No! No! No!
" I told them. The problem wasn't the language; it was how hard the foreign interface made it to use our results. We were breaking our brand, and instead of repairing the cracks they found it more amusing to watch our equity pour onto the floor. I had lived through PR crises before, and this one was becoming a
sabakova kashmar.
*
Complaints kept coming. Though the tone was less virulent than when the German text was up, users were still unhappy they couldn't navigate the site easily. We were breaking a cardinal rule by making it difficult for them to get to information they sought. One user lamented that our little joke was costing her money—a professional researcher, she could no longer use Google to do her job.
I had worked at big companies long enough that I hesitated to escalate the problem to our top executive. But I had worked at Google long enough not to be intimidated by an org chart. I called Sergey. It was hard to hear over the background noise of rowdy engineers in a crowded restaurant, but I could tell he was surprised when I insisted we drop all the foreign-language results.
I was pooping the party, but Sergey reluctantly agreed, most likely so he could rejoin the festivities without fear of another interruption.
It took forever to reach Susan, and it was midnight before all the foreign-language text was stripped off the site.
"A not-insignificant fraction of our users are complete idiots," groused one engineer, "if they can't figure out how to use our site, just because it's all in Portuguese." Google had clearly crossed the gap from serving the tech elite to playing in the mainstream market—an online segment he knew to be densely populated with the clueless.
"I'm more worried that we got spooked by a little negative feedback," said Howard, the iconoclastic easy-riding engineer. "We backed off the playfulness that's an important part of Google. We watered down our April Fools' joke to make it less invasive. I guess that's what happens as we grow up—we become a more conservative company." He did not see that as a positive development.
Sergey tacitly agreed that the problem was not on our end. German results were quite funny. Besides, far more user feedback about MentalPlex was positive than negative.
At two a.m. I crawled into bed. I dreamed a monochrome dream about Germans and Lisbon and a police captain who looked at me quizzically and asked, "Shut it down? But everyone is having such a good time!"
The next morning I felt emotionally hung over. I had launched a joke that worked. MentalPlex perfectly fit Google's unconventional and just-a-bit geeky style. Sergey had been right all along—it was okay to play with our brand. But the mistake of translating the results interface embarrassed me. I worried that it didn't embarrass any of my colleagues.
Why had it required so much effort to make a change once complaints started coming in? Why had the decision been made to switch to Portuguese? Who had made that decision anyway? What was my role as brand manager, if not to manage the brand? I now understood where true power resided at Google. It lived in the keyboards of those authorized to push a new GWS, to actually check in the code that drove the site. Those engineers were the ultimate gatekeepers. Even when I had a green light to move a project down the tracks, someone with a different idea and a hand on the switch could change our course in the middle of the night—leaving me to awaken a hundred miles away from where I'd thought I'd be when I went to bed. MentalPlex had almost derailed us.
As soon as I got to work on Monday, I wrote up a postmortem memo to keep it from happening again. I included all the data I could glean from the six hundred email responses we had received. Seventy percent liked MentalPlex. Most of the rest complained about the translation of the interface into another language. My note codified the lesson that we should never, ever intentionally make it harder for people to search. I drafted a letter of apology to users who had complained and offered to send them free Google t-shirts. The nightmare was over. We had taken our lumps and learned from our mistake, and now we could roll on.
Not necessarily so, Marissa argued.
"The problem is not that we translated the interface into German," she said, "but that we called attention to the change by including a 'tip' about MentalPlex detecting German thoughts." In her view, if we had just put a disclaimer on the page that it was a joke, no one would have been upset.
"Most people would likely not have even noticed the translation without the tip," another engineer agreed. "Only the navigational text on the page was rendered in German—the web results themselves were still in English."
How could users not notice, I wondered, that all the text except the actual results was no longer in English? And adding a line at the bottom explaining it was all in jest would not only have failed to solve that problem, it would have been an admission that the joke was too weak to sustain itself. Jonathan Swift rarely used asterisks to explain he was being satiric.
Marissa and I never saw eye-to-eye on MentalPlex. She questioned my categorization of the user feedback even when I sent the original emails to her. I had cut-and-dried, irrefutable, objective facts at my disposal, yet we fundamentally disagreed on how to interpret the data. I wasn't interested in placing blame, but I did want to make sure we learned from our mistake and didn't repeat it. To do that, we had to reach consensus on what the mistake had been.
Omid Kordestani, the head of our sales and business development group, offered his opinion. "Really amateurish!" he complained. He meant MentalPlex from start to finish. Omid hadn't seen MentalPlex coming, and when it smacked him in the face on April 1, he was furious. Calm, smiling, even-keeled Omid derided our joke as likely to alienate the very advertisers his team had been working so hard to befriend. And had we even considered international users who simply wouldn't get our all-American attempt at humor?
"I hope we never repeat it," he admonished us. "Thank God this happened on a Friday night." There was only one silver lining Omid could see. Portal sites like Yahoo, who thought we might compete with them, would no longer worry about us. We clearly wouldn't be stealing their users with this kind of immature grab-ass idiocy. We weren't a Stanford dorm-room project anymore, Omid reminded us. We were running a serious business, and this came off like a beer-fueled freshman prank. I think he flashed back to his days at Netscape—a company high on its own hubris until a giant jackboot ground its face into reality.
"Not to worry, Omid," Sergey offered reassuringly. "We do foolhardy things from time to time, but not at random, and they usually have positive results."
*
I pointed Omid to all the positive feedback from our users, but Cindy let me know I had blown it big time. Omid was a stakeholder and should have been in the loop. Another lesson learned the hard way. If nothing else, I consoled myself, at least this would give impetus to a more formal sign-off process. That would reel in the late-night GWS pushers and stop their off-key improvisations. As if.
Though no one else seemed to take a lesson from the MentalPlex mishap, I found an epiphany in the dust of the dying hubbub. I could build Google's brand from inside the product. I didn't need to rely on banner ads or postcard programs. Google's personality would shine through in the way we—the way I—talked with users. I could try anything, because the only ones looking over my shoulder were two guys noticeably lacking inhibitions. It was a liberating moment.
I owned Google's words. Now I would give them a voice.
Google time folded in on itself like a tempered samurai sword. So much activity took place simultaneously that the linear narrative of this book flattens the immersive 3D experience into an unrecognizable shape. Maybe if you tear out the pages, throw them in the air, and read from them randomly as they flutter down around you, you'll get a better feel for what it was like. I'd been at the company five months, and every hour of every day another neural pathway in my brain uprooted itself and traced a new route to an unexpected destination.