Authors: Douglas Edwards
The problems at first were minor. Our engineering "experts" couldn't read our rich-text-formatted attachments on their Linux-based machines, so they couldn't help us answer technical questions. Some of the routing rules were unpredictable, and everyone who contacted us received multiple automated responses. Then, one day, a help request I sent to Miasma's own corporate mail system bounced back as undeliverable. That seemed a touch foreboding.
Miasma's staffers were eager to help when we finally got in touch with them, and we continued plugging in patches as needs arose. They fixed reporting so we could see how far behind we were and gave us access to the system remotely via the Internet. We added RAM to the server sitting under Denise's desk and learned how to restart it when it froze, as it did frequently. Though Miasma improved our organization of email, it ran slowly and required repeated manual intervention. With the new technology completely installed, we weren't responding to users any more quickly than we had been before.
We fell further and further behind. I checked the queue one day and saw we had more than ten thousand unanswered emails. Miasma's tech staff came back to tweak and tune and reboot the server, but—after months of fits and starts—we gave up. We declared email bankruptcy, archived the unanswered mail, and started over with a blank slate. We were able to normalize our system after a few months, but we never approached the level of rapid response we had envisioned. Each week as I reported our anemic numbers, I felt the pressure to make things work better.
If Max had been able to answer
x
number of emails without Miasma, Salar asked, shouldn't Denise and Rob be able to answer some multiple of
x
emails with the new tool in place? Why hire more reps if we weren't getting everything out of the people we had? I knew the problem wasn't the people answering the email, it was the increase in complex queries and foreign-language messages and the built-in limitations of the software we were using.
I had put myself in a precarious position. My chosen vendor's product had failed to improve throughput and instead hampered our ability to maintain the level we had achieved previously. It didn't matter that Larry and Sergey had liked the software enough to consider using it for their personal email. It didn't matter that budget constraints precluded a more established supplier. It didn't matter that the vendor seemed committed to whacking the moles as they popped their problematic heads out to taunt us. We were leaking productivity, and it was my mess to clean up.
Denise and Rob worked diligently over long hours to clear our backlog, but if they answered easy questions, the response time for more technical questions grew too long. If they focused on technical questions, overall response rates dropped, because more time was needed to find the answers. Foreign-language email just languished in limbo.
This went on for a full year, with issues popping up and emails flying back and forth to Miasma tech support in India. Finally Miasma announced they would deliver a full upgrade to their software to fix all our problems and make rainbows shine across our network and unicorns dance on our desks. First, though, we needed to walk through the fire of a major assault on user support.
It was November 2000 when I first learned that Google was buying another company. The acquisition, code-named "Yogi," was an online archive of Usenet posts known as Deja News. We would announce the deal the following February.
If you're a Usenet aficionado, you'll probably take issue with what I say about it here, so why not skip the next paragraph and avoid the heartburn? Of course you won't. If you like Usenet, you live for heartburn.
In a nutshell, Usenet is a computer network that preceded the World Wide Web. Founded in 1980, it provided a place for academics and scientists to share information with colleagues by posting messages in newsgroups on an electronic bulletin board. Newsgroups were divided into subject categories such as "comp." for computers or "sci." for science or "rec." for recreation. The name coming after the period indicated the subgroup, as in "
sci.research.AIDS
." Over time, Usenet devolved from its noble purpose to reflect the common concerns and issues of our times, with groups like "
rec.arts.movies.slasher
" and an explosion in binary files, which contained encoded software, music, and images since reposted on websites requiring a credit card and proof of age. Moreover, the nature of the dialogue on Usenet changed from dry academic discussions to heated polemics on politics and religion and a multitude of other contentious issues, giving birth to such terms as "flame mail" and "trolling."
Deja News was home to a continuously updated archive of five hundred million of these posts going back to 1995, including such classics as the announcement of AltaVista's launch and the first mention of Google. Unfortunately, Deja News could no longer afford to maintain the service. In fact, it couldn't even provide access to all the data it had archived. Desperate, it came to Google, seeking a way to keep their data from sinking forever into obscurity. Recognizing the value of the content, Larry and Sergey threw them a lifeline, offering to take the archive, clean it up, make it more searchable, and host it going forward. Google already had plans to launch its own Usenet site at
groups.google.com
, so the timing was fortuitous. Still, it was an act of mercy and everyone involved knew it.
The handoff happened quickly—too quickly for Google to do much more than launch a stopgap service based on a separate, recently acquired archive of Usenet posts, while our engineers organized the Deja data and built a better system to deliver it. The interim site wouldn't contain all the posts back to 1995 as Deja's had: it would only offer posts dating back a year. Users wouldn't be able to browse through different groups (though they could search them) or post new messages. Most significantly, they wouldn't be able to "nuke" or remove posts they had already written, even if they had deleted them previously (Deja had suppressed display of deleted comments, but never actually expunged them from the old database). Some Deja users were about to rediscover the offensive and embarrassing notes they had written while angry or drunk, thought twice about, and destroyed. Or at least believed they had destroyed.
I could smell the crap clouds gathering.
I drafted copy for Deja's former homepage and an FAQ explaining that Google was engaged in "brute force mud-wrestling with gigabytes of unruly data" to reintroduce a new and improved Usenet archive. I made it clear the effort was ongoing and things would get better soon.
On Monday, February 12, 2001, the old
Deja.com
went away and Google's interim site went live. Within seconds, outrage overflowed from clogged limbic systems across the network and flooded my inbox. User support began responding with the soothing language I had supplied, acknowledging that we had "received a number of questions and comments" and letting our angry customers know that we understood "the inconvenience that this has caused." Cindy assured me the tone was perfect. I had to agree, and as we were both professional wordsmiths, I assumed that would be the end of it.
It wasn't. Deja's stung fans reacted as if we'd snatched honeycomb out of their hive with a big hairy bear claw. They swarmed us. Their emails overloaded our fragile CRM system all Monday afternoon and just kept coming. We couldn't answer the specialized questions that related only to Usenet, and our generic responses just agitated users. Our mailboxes filled with mud and fire.
Larry and Sergey were surprised by Deja's ungrateful users. We had rescued a valuable Internet resource from the ash heap of history at our own expense and committed to launching an improved archive with access to far more data than Deja had ever offered. "What's wrong with these people?" they wondered. They wouldn't have to go far to find out; within days, disgruntled Usenetters were literally knocking on Google's front door to complain.
"OK, you guys are in
damage control mode, act like it!!!
" screamed one user. "So far your attitude is real smug." He went on to compare us to Firestone, whose fatally flawed tires were the subject of a safety recall, though as far as I know no one died from lack of access to three-year-old posts in
rec.arts.sf.starwars
.
Wayne Rosing, our new head of engineering, shook off the assault, saying, "What matters is whether we're doing the right thing, and if people don't understand that now, they will eventually come to understand it."
It was a lesson that would shape Google's attitude toward the public from that point on. Sure, we had upset people with MentalPlex, but at least some of us conceded their kvetching might have had cause. With Deja, we were clearly on the side of the angels. The public just didn't get it. Even when we worked our asses off, spent our own cash, and tried to do something good for them, they bellowed and ranted, bitched and moaned. Since users were being so unreasonable, we could safely ignore their complaints. That suited our founders just fine—they always went with their guts anyway.
I've been asked if Larry and Sergey were truly brilliant. I can't speak to their IQs, but I saw with my own eyes that their vision burned so brightly it scorched everything that stood in its way. The truth was so obvious that they felt no need for the niceties of polite society when bringing their ideas to life. Why slow down to explain when the value of what they were doing was so self-evident that people would eventually see it for themselves?
That attitude was both Google's strength and its Achilles' heel. From launching a better search engine in an overcrowded field to running unscreened text in AdWords, the success of controversial ideas gave momentum to the conviction that initial public opinion was often irrelevant.
By the end of the year we proved our intent had always been honorable, rolling out not just the features users had clamored for but an archive that extended back twenty years instead of just the five Deja had offered.
*
This was almost single-handedly the work of Michael Schmitt, an engineer who took it upon himself to conduct a global search to track down tapes and CD backups of the earliest Usenet posts and the hardware that could read them. He recovered for posterity the first Usenet mention of Microsoft, Tim Berners-Lee's first posted reference to the "World Wide Web," and Marc Andreessen's public disclosure of the Mosaic web browser that would become Netscape.
"If there were justice in the world," wrote a formerly disappointed Usenetter, "you guys would be rich and Bill Gates would be standing in line waiting for watery soup." Not that Larry and Sergey needed affirmation that they had made the right call, but still, it was nice to hear.
A
MONTH AFTER WE
bought Deja, a hundred and forty Googlers packed up overnight bags, boarded a fleet of buses, and headed for the hills. It was time for Google's annual ski trip.
The ritual started when Google was just eight people and Larry very cautiously drove a rented van to Lake Tahoe while Sergey, Craig, Ray, and Harry killed time playing logic games in the back and Heather struggled to stay awake. The group saved $2.50 a day by designating Larry the only driver, which was a given anyway because Larry wasn't about to put his life in anyone else's hands.
I didn't go with the group in 2000, even though frequent reminders from Heather made it clear that the ski trip was not optional. The trip was a teambuilding exercise and thus only for staff members. No family. That didn't sit well with Kristen, who had already seen enough at Google to have reservations. The tipping point may have been the day she came to lunch and noticed an attractive twenty-something woman whose thong underwear was all too visible through her sheer harem pants.
"Who's that?" my wife whispered directly in my ear as the woman slid her tray past the entrées toward the desserts.
"Oh, just one of the engineers," I replied. "She rides a motorcycle," I offered helpfully.
So when I let Kristen know that Google required my presence on the slopes at Lake Tahoe for an employee-only bonding trip, what she heard was, "please stay at home with our three children while I head out with a busload of adrenaline-charged, hormone-drenched post-adolescents for three days of bacchanalian binge-drinking, substance abuse, and room-key swapping."
She got it mostly right. I know, because the next year I convinced her my career would be damaged if I didn't go along. Google paid all our travel expenses, including chartered buses and food and lodging at the elegant Resort at Squaw Creek and gave us each a fifty-dollar stipend to spend on ski lessons. It wouldn't cost me anything, and it was only for a couple of days. Please honey? Please?
We shared accommodations to save money and I roomed with Bay and our newly hired attorney Kulpreet Rana. Bay got the short straw and slept on the floor. While I'm proud to say I was so hopelessly unhip that I missed out on anything more decadent than a late-night soak in an outdoor hot tub with Larry, Salar, Urs, Omid, and a dozen other Googlers, it was clear some of my coworkers were showing less restraint.
I heard tales of excess involving not only recent college graduates but those who theoretically had the years and experience to know better. Many of these tales coincidentally began with a visit to "Charlie's Den"—the room Chef Charlie occupied with Keith from accounting and an SUV load of liquor ferried up from Mountain View. As the trip grew in scale and Charlie's hospitality grew in reputation, the party relocated to an oversized luxury suite and then a meeting room with an open bar sporting seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of booze and an ample supply of other social lubricants. Specialties of the house included herb-infused brownies and dark chocolate Goo Balls.
*
Out of coincidence, or perhaps the perverse humor of Heather and the HR folks managing the event, Larry's room was usually adjacent to the party plex. One year all the liquor was unloaded into Larry's suite by mistake. Larry didn't drink, though he sometimes carried a thimbleful of beer at parties to put others at ease.