Authors: Douglas Edwards
I broke the news to David. "It's a good start, but I'm afraid we need something more developed."
"Not to worry," he said, taking notes on the features we wanted. "I can get these done. How about I come back next week with a new demo?"
It was more like two weeks before we met again. In that time, David and his partner, Brandon Long, had implemented more than thirty feature improvements from our list. It was impressive, but I was far from convinced. I was more worried that David seemed to think he had a shot at winning the contract—I didn't want him complaining to Larry when his hopes were dashed. I decided to head him off at the pass by talking to Larry myself.
"Actually," Larry recommended when I described the situation, "you should hire these guys. They're really smart. They'll work hard to build the product for us, and we can invest in their company."
"Larry," I explained slowly and carefully, "we just went through hell with an undeveloped product. I can't burden my team with another flaky piece of software that will just slow us down. We're close with a real CRM company and should have a proposal in a couple of days. I'll let David down gently."
"No. Really," Larry repeated. "You should hire these guys. Look, they're a small company and they'll be very responsive. We can give them space in the office and they'll live here and build their product to our specs. We'll be their most important client, and we'll benefit from their growth based on our product design ideas. Have Biz Dev negotiate the contract and make sure we get some equity."
I could say I was stunned, outraged, incredulous, but that would be an understatement. I couldn't believe Larry was going cheap again instead of buying reliability. When I informed the other vendors, they thought I was either corrupt or an idiot. One salesman sent blistering emails demanding to talk directly to Eric and our board of directors. "This decision lacks wisdom and foresight," he asserted. "If you are under the impression that you can build an email tool resembling ours in thirty days, you are mistaken. It has taken us four years and twelve hundred customers to get to where we are. To not include us in your plans does not make sense."
That guy was kind of a jerk anyway, so telling him no didn't bother me, but I'd still be cursing Larry's decision today if not for one small thing: Larry was absolutely right. Though we wasted weeks negotiating our investment in Jeske's nascent company NeoTonic (we squeezed just an extra one-tenth of one percent in equity out of them), by the end of October 2001 we had the new Trakken CRM system running in parallel with Miasma. David and Brandon lived in our office and Denise Griffin, our user-support manager, gave them a daily list of desired features and bug fixes. Unlike the big "reliable" company I had wanted to hire, NeoTonic didn't have hundreds of customers using the same product. They didn't release upgrades only twice a year. They fixed things as they came up, in priority order. Within a couple of months we had the CRM system we wanted, built to our specs, fully stable and intuitive to use. We cut our ties with Miasma and never looked back. A year and a half later, we bought the rest of NeoTonic, making its two founders full-time Googlers.
So what did I learn from all this? I learned that obvious solutions are not the only ones and "safe" choices aren't always good choices. I had thought that due diligence meant finding the product most people relied on, then putting pressure on the vendor to cut the price. It never occurred to me to talk to a startup, even though I worked at one. It never occurred to Larry
not
to do that. We had different tolerances for risk and different ideas about what two smart people working alone could accomplish in a complex technical area—and that is why I spent seven years working in mainstream media while Larry found a partner and founded his own company. Two smart guys working on complex technical problems, it turns out, can accomplish a hell of a lot.
The "translation console" was an idea, like building our own ad system and hiring the Trakken guys, that originated with Wunderground, the weather site founded by Larry's college friends. It was a tool for translating our site into all the languages scattered over the face of the earth. Marissa was the chief proponent of implementing it at Google, and Ron Garrett was the lead engineer.
The translation console split all the text on Google's pages into single sentences, phrases, or even words to make it easy for volunteers to translate our interface one bit at a time. When users posted multiple correct translations, they earned editorial power to overwrite awkward or incorrect submissions made by others. If it worked, the system would make our site available in hundreds of different languages—a long and arduous task for us to manage alone.
Insofar as we had a clear strategy, a big part of it seemed to be getting other people to do our work for free. Nowadays that's known as "crowd-sourcing." We just called it "cutting costs." Self-service AdWords, porn cookies, affiliate programs, viral marketing—all were based on many hands lightening the load and the unbeatable value of unpaid labor. Google parsed all its tough problems into manageable pieces and parceled them out.
Our engineering staff worked in teams of three instead of in large groups assigned to a single massive project. Our hardware employed thousands of small computers working in parallel instead of large mainframes. Our desktops ran on Linux, an open-source operating system cobbled together by volunteers. We sharded databases into smaller segments to make searching them faster. When we finally built a trade show booth, Larry and Sergey made us do it as a design contest for college students. Why settle for one "professional" designer when you can have a hundred students applying their creativity?
This divide-and-conquer approach even informed the basic algorithms running Google search. Rather than basing search results solely on a single source—the content of individual web pages—Google looked at links created by millions of people to determine a site's importance. Sergey called it "the democracy of the web," because each link was a vote cast in favor of a site's credibility. That approach made Google scale better than the competition, because the more the web expanded, the more links Google harvested for its ranking algorithm.
The translation console would be another break—it-into—tiny-pieces solution for the big, bloated mess of multiple languages. Marissa and Ron set up some fun languages Googlers could use to test the system before it went live, including Pig Latin, Klingon, and Elmer Fudd ("I'm Feewing Wucky"). Marissa translated our entire interface into Bork, Bork, Bork, the language of the Swedish Chef from the
Muppet Show.
The first real new interfaces to launch were Afrikaans, Bulgarian, and Catalan, and we formally announced the console to the world on March 27, 2001. Within five months, volunteers had translated Google into sixty—four languages.
That still left a need for translation of our ad products, user—support responses, licensing, and operations. The task of building a globalization group within Google to accomplish these things had been tossed around like a beach ball at a rock concert. Various outside translation agencies billed us enormous amounts for work that sounded awkward to native speakers. No one in the company had any real experience with internationalization (known as "i18n" for short because there are eighteen letters between the word's initial
i
and its final
n
). So, as with user support, this non—engineering function found a home in marketing's realm.
Fortunately, the responsibility came with a "Sergey." To get control of the accelerating hiring within the company, the executive team had decided to allocate positions by department, with each approved job opening represented by a laminated photo of Sergey. The departments had some flexibility in the way they allocated their Sergeys, but when you showed up at the hiring committee, you needed to bring three "enthusiastic endorsements" for your candidate from current Googlers plus a Sergey to trade for the proposed hire. No Sergey, no hire.
It had taken us a while to post our position, interview candidates, and extend an offer, so it was August 2001 before Stephanie Kerebel, a native of France, joined our group as globalization manager. She had years of experience in dealing with professional translators and immediately implemented cost—saving measures, such as paying for translation by the word and not the job. That alone cut our expenses in half.
We had been directing our professional translators to use the console alongside the volunteers, to save time. We needed professionals to help with our most important languages because waiting for volunteers would delay product launches. There was also a risk that volunteers might intentionally sabotage us with bad translations, a risk we were unwilling to take with popular interfaces that might reach millions of users.
Stephanie saw other limitations to our system as well and recommended we supplement it with Trados, the industry standard translation—management software. Trados had a number of features useful to translators, including version control and a customized glossary that increased in scope over time, ensuring consistency across multiple projects and speeding translation while reducing the cost. Professional translators found it helpful, especially those who did not have an easy way to do all their work online. Stephanie announced she was buying a copy of the software for Google.
And so the i18n war began.
Marissa fired the first shot. The ellipsis at the end of "Forse cercavi ...," our Italian translator's rendering of "I'm feeling lucky," felt awkward to her, so she removed it. She admonished Stephanie to tell our contractors to "pay attention" and not create formatting issues. The head of our Italian office replied that he preferred the original translation: the three dots made the phrase more elegant. I asked Marissa why she had overruled two native speakers and our localization expert. The cork came flying out of the bottle.
Marissa claimed that one of the other engineers thought it looked as if our site had been hacked because the punctuation was unusual. She told me she had delayed pushing out the new Italian interface because of her translation concerns, meaning we had violated the agreement that localization would never delay a launch. And while she was on the subject, Marissa poured out a litany of issues with marketing's i18n approach: the slowness of professional translators, the time required for quality assurance, the resistance of marketing staff and translators to using the translation console. The capper was our decision to buy Trados, which would increase engineering costs because someone would have to insert translations manually. Engineering didn't have time to build Trados features into the translation console as we had requested. Why, Marissa wanted to know, couldn't we just hire people who were not only good translators but also comfortable working in the translation console?
Wayne Rosing, the head of engineering, weighed in with his perspective. He wanted to keep Google's back—end technology as uncomplicated as possible. Google ran faster with fewer systems, and each new technology we introduced slowed our progress like a remora attached to the streamlined body of a great white shark.
I hadn't realized there was contention around our use of Trados or problems with how localization was proceeding. It seemed to me things had improved enormously. Quality was up. Costs were down. I needed more data to support our position, so I talked with the one translator I knew who had the tech chops not to be intimidated by the console or any other online tool.
Dennis Hwang—the same Dennis who drew homepage doodles—had used the translation console to render our interface into Korean. In his opinion, the technology had two major flaws. The most serious was a lack of context. Translators using the console saw one word or phrase at a time, without any awareness of where on a page it might appear. So when a translator saw the word "Bulgarian," he didn't know whether to use the word for a Bulgarian man or the Bulgarian language. And since each piece of text might go to a different translator, there was no continuity in the flow. Once it was reassembled, it often read awkwardly or even nonsensically.
The other problem was that when the console presented a word to be translated, it took the translation and pasted it into exactly the same place the English word had been, and with the exact same formatting. That led to inappropriate bolding, italics, and spacing that could change the sense of a phrase.
I shared Dennis's feedback with Marissa. It was unlikely we'd find translators who were more comfortable with the console than Dennis, and if he felt there were problems, we should probably address them. I was sensitive to burdening engineering, but the primary concern of the marketing group was that the finished translation not embarrass us as we tried to build market share in a new language.
The engineers saw clearly that the problem was the people, not the technology. If we could improve the quality of the translators, we could get by with just the translation console. From my perspective, translators were not engineers and shouldn't have to waste time learning to use software mismatched to the task at hand. Even Marissa admitted having felt frustration while translating our site into Bork, Bork, Bork.
We negotiated a compromise. Work on all but the top eight languages
*
would be done exclusively by volunteers in the console, while professional translators could use Trados. Those translations would be imported into the console by a yet-to-be-developed automated script. That script remained yet-to-be-developed for years, but the agreement meant we had clear guidelines for moving ahead. The tradeoff was accepting the risk of unprofessional translation in all but a handful of languages. A couple of months later Sergey noticed that a volunteer had used the console to change the Search button on our Russian homepage to say "Click here bitch." Another volunteer changed Google Malta's Search button to a traditional Maltese insult, "penis in a can."