Authors: Douglas Edwards
We put up the ribbon and waited. The first email in response surprised me. "Congratulations," it read, "on resisting the pressure to create a special memorial interface. The Internet is full of these special events that are very U.S. focused and simplify the enormity of the events during and after the attacks. Google is obviously created by individuals with a global perspective and a sophisticated understanding of the complexity of the world's current political and cultural problems. By keeping the standard Google interface, you remained intelligently worldly and open, at a time when these characteristics seem tragically rare."
Other users made similar comments. The day passed quietly for us.
Yahoo chose a different path. They rendered their entire homepage in funereal gray and placed in the middle of it a large black box containing these words: "September 11, 2001—We remember. In tribute to the more than 3,000 lives lost." There was a link labeled "Click here to learn, share and remember."
I appreciated the impulse behind their decision to create a living memorial, but seeing that approach in action confirmed for me the difference between our site and a "traditional" portal site. We were not about content generation, or evoking memories, or creating an atmosphere of mourning. Google's brand was built on simplicity and functionality and we knew enough to stick with it. We acknowledged the anniversary of 9/11 and we provided our usual search service. Our users could direct Google to find the information they wanted to see. We didn't try to tell people how to feel about the occasion or to build an experience for them on the basis of what we thought was most significant.
"I think you articulated the right insight," Marissa agreed. "We as a company have no unique perspective to offer on this tragedy, so while we can recognize and acknowledge it, it doesn't make sense to prepare content about it."
Since those days, Google has developed many more ways to communicate directly with users: numerous official blogs, news feeds, and Google-produced YouTube videos. Our response to 9/11, however, overflowed the banks of our established communication channel and helped establish Google as more than a disinterested corporation. Users could feel the presence of the people beyond the stark white screen of our homepage and see the shadows cast upon it as we scurried about backstage trying to find ways to help. There was no question about our intent, and the constant updates we pushed, while not always professional in appearance, were earnest efforts to go above and beyond the minimum expectations of our service in a time of national need. I think it was one of the company's finest moments. I'm proud to have played a part in it.
Chapter 17Google's big ideas.
There are fortunes to be made.
And mistakes as well.
G
OOGLE WENT THROUGH
some rough times in 2001, though the hard work and stress paid off—mostly with more hard work and stress. The company's revenue numbers continued to improve. Traffic was up. The September 11 attacks, though, seeped into everyone's mood.
My own attitude at work was generally positive. I had figured out how to contribute something of at least nominal value, and the variety of tasks requiring my attention ensured I never grew bored. Hours were long and my family rarely seen, but aside from that, life was good. In any decent narrative, however, a certain amount of conflict must occur. I had my share of disputes with Larry and Sergey, but more of my daily friction arose from my fractious relationship with Marissa Mayer.
Marissa and I crossed each other's paths with increasing frequency that year. We'd spend weeks toiling in the product fields in perfect harmony, agreeing on significant projects like RealNames, and then some minor difference of opinion over a word here or there would turn into a flame war that singed every thatched roof in our communal village. Most of our disagreements sprang from a shared desire to do what was best for our users. Their satisfaction was our common deity, but we worshipped in different ways. Those disagreements began to take on more weight as Marissa's role expanded and it became harder to appeal her decisions—especially as she controlled the agenda and attendance list for Larry's product-review meetings, the logical place to hold such discussions. Increasingly, resolutions reached at our UI team meetings were undone at product review, where Marissa was now often the only team member present.
In the late spring of 2001, the UI team debated the color scheme for our expanding product line. Should Google groups be green or orange? What about image search? We sent around mockups to compare implementations. After weeks of discussion, Marissa took her own recommendation directly to product review. She handed down Larry's "final decision" after that meeting, while encouraging us to have a parallel discussion within the UI team.
"Doesn't a final decision negate any parallel discussions?" Karen asked. "I understand the urgency about making these decisions, but since Larry didn't have other pages for comparison, this may have been a rigged vote. We've spent hours on this in UI and it seems that the right thing to do would be to get consensus. Otherwise, why discuss it at all?" Coming from Karen, who always maintained a nonjudgmental tone, the indictment was particularly stinging.
Marissa responded that the timeline had been clear all along and that "forward motion" was needed to stay on track for the release the following week. Since we'd been talking about it for more than a month, it looked to her as if no consensus was reachable and she'd simply gone with what we had.
Marissa's desire to "fix things" as soon as they came to her attention was a common impulse among engineers, and Marissa was unquestionably productive. But where Urs had emphasized the need
not
to do tasks that fell below the priority line, Marissa's focus seemed diffuse. Every problem that came along required her immediate solution, even if it belonged in someone else's realm.
Bay Chang, who was also on the UI team, had done his doctoral dissertation on human-computer interactions (HCI). Yet he recognized that, at some point, creativity entered the equation. When we fell into overthinking a particular question, he bowed out gracefully. "I think maybe I should shut up," he said, "because I've been contributing too much to the design-by-committee on this page. We engineers should probably be involved with designing what components are necessary and how the technical parts of the page work and let the designers do the layout. It's a better division of labor."
I heard in that an endorsement for my own view that human judgment played a role, even in an atmosphere where every breath inhaled stats and exhaled analysis. Marissa tried to base every decision on data and data alone. That was hardly an unreasonable approach, and most Googlers would have supported it. Perhaps I just didn't trust the data I saw.
I had my own idiosyncrasies, of course—obstinacy and self-righteousness among them. The combination did not lead to quick or peaceful resolutions. The more often Marissa and I disagreed, the more I dug in my heels on matters of little consequence, like whether our porn filter screened "adult content" or "mature content."
The question of what to do about Chad was a bigger deal.
On August 1, 2001, I arrived at work to discover that our homepage sported a new feature. There was a link to a page describing the adventures of our beloved leftover-eating engineer, Chad, as he attempted to bicycle from California to Florida. I really liked Chad, and I knew that he was burning off a few pork chops on a cross-country ride that would take him over the Rockies and across the continent. However, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why we were chronicling his adventures on the homepage of our search engine. Cindy was puzzled as well. And the UI team, including our webmaster Karen, also wondered W, exactly, TF?
"So ... this page went up on short notice," Marissa explained to us. "Someone came up with the idea at lunch yesterday. Urs presented it to Jen McGrath and me, and we put it in the product review. Larry liked it and informed EStaff. A few hours later it was on the site. Sorry for not giving more notice, but opportunity was short, since his trip is elapsing by the day and we've already missed half of it."
Ah, it was an engineering thing.
"Chad's trip is very cool," Marissa insisted. "We wanted to be supportive and we realized that people might find this of interest." The page included a map showing Chad's general location and offered Google t-shirts to anyone who captured his image and sent the photo to us.
Adding something nonessential to the homepage in the middle of the night struck me as unnecessarily rash. "Given our propensity to test every small modification we make to the UI," I argued in response, "this feels like a fairly significant change to make with no discussion at all. I don't think it's a bad thing to honor Chad or to have a fun promo line on the homepage. But since this particular one involves PR, customer service, and our brand, I wish that Cindy and I had been consulted first. It's unlikely the difference between putting it up last night and this morning would have been significant."
Marissa pointed at Urs and suggested the urgency had been his. There simply hadn't been time to notify the UI team until after the Chad page had already shipped. She agreed the page should have been held until the morning and reminded me that she had worked hard to put the UI team process in place. Still, I bridled at the systemic exclusion of marketing from decisions with obvious brand impact.
In retrospect, I'm not sure that was such a bad thing.
Part of the power of Google's brand was the cluelessly geek chic it projected, as though a site serving millions of users around the globe were being run by a handful of nerds who didn't know any better than to put whatever struck their fancy on the homepage. I think I had a pretty good ear for that nerd voice and was able to channel it into the communications I crafted, but I also know that I always wanted to smooth out the rough edges and make things flow a little more nicely across the screen. It was the English major in me. Sand down too many protruding bits, though, and you end up with a perfect sphere that's not terribly interesting.
So while at the time I was quite perturbed at being usurped, the tension between Marissa and me may actually have resulted in a better brand. A brand that walked a line between overt nerdiness and polished pabulum. We were the yin and the yang: marketing and engineering, glibness and geekspeak, a gracefully arcing comma in a classic Garamond font complementing a rigidly vertical apostrophe in fixed-pitch ASCII.
Okay, so it wasn't a perfect match. There were plenty of occasions when the center did not hold; when we did something I considered tone-deaf or Marissa considered insufficiently Googley. Google was an engineering company. When we did not agree, we usually did what engineering thought best.
One upshot of the bicycle debacle (as I came to think of the Chad contretemps) was that Marissa explicitly agreed that the text on the site was my province, even as she rejected, rewrote, or edited the "final" copy I passed along to be posted. We butted heads frequently over the months and years to come. Sometimes I won and sometimes I lost, but the arguments were always elucidating. And when Marissa and I agreed on the best way to approach a topic or about principles that should not be violated, I felt assured we had captured some essential element of what it meant to be Googley.
Shortly after 9/11, Larry granted Marissa's request to join the product management (PM) team. He put her in charge of the user experience on
Google.com
—the consumer-facing part of our business and the basis for our brand. Marissa had been acting as the UI lead for some time, but now it was official. Her move to the product side raised some eyebrows, because it meant abdicating her engineering birthright, a sacrifice akin to giving up citizenship in the Roman Empire to become a Thracian slave. It also meant she would be reporting to Larry.
In the end, Marissa's move worked brilliantly for her. Product management gave her a far wider playing field than she ever would have had as an individual contributor in engineering. She became the disciple spreading the word of Larry, a word often passed to her in conversations restricted to the two of them, making it difficult to know where Larry's dictates ended and Marissa's interpretation began. Larry rarely refuted Marissa's directives, though, so eventually we came to believe that the gospel she preached was if not true to its source, at least not antithetical to it.
To the casual observer, Project Hedwig was a weird and random product, a tool for searching mail-order catalogs that enabled users to call up images of printed pages online. Enter "blue baby doll t-shirt" and up popped a page from the Gap's merchandise flyer. Not terribly useful, important, or urgently needed. But Hedwig had a secret agenda. Larry wanted to prove it was possible to digitize every page ever printed.
Catalogs were readily available. They cost nothing. They could be easily scanned, since no one cared if they were damaged in the process. And perhaps most important, their publishers wouldn't object to having their copyrighted material reproduced. What merchant would complain about reaching a raft of potential new customers without paying for paper, ink, or a government employee to stuff their mailboxes? That was the theory anyway.
In October 2001, Pearl Renaker, a newly hired PM, began asking Googlers to bring her all the catalogs we received in the mail. Within a couple of weeks, the engineers had built a prototype for internal testing. The results were less than spectacular. A search for toys yielded no results for anything I might want to buy my kids. There were, however, plenty of toys for puppies and very, very naughty grown-ups.