Authors: Douglas Edwards
Engineer Howard Gobioff disagreed. "Don't be evil," he said, was a core value, which meant we needed to protect user privacy with any service we launched, whether it bore our name or not. It would have been no better if orkut users hadn't known Google was behind the service that was exposing their personal information.
Some defended the decision to prototype and launch quickly—to experiment and keep innovating. But their voices were drowned out by the angry mob clamoring for an explanation of why orkut had been allowed to go out with underweight technology, draped only in a thin association with Google that hid none of its problems. The criticism was not directed at Orkut himself or his admirable desire to try something new. The anger coalesced around the launch process. A number of engineers told me they had agreed with my original proposal to launch orkut on Google labs. I was glad to hear it, but their affirmation left a bittersweet taste.
When I first arrived at Google, I felt strongly about things and was often wrong. Fortunately, Larry and Sergey ignored my ideas. I had learned from that experience. Now I felt strongly about things and was often right. Unfortunately, my ideas were still being ignored. I wasn't sure which slight was more painful, but I suspected it was the latter.
Despite its rough start, orkut became a smash success—in Estonia, India, and Brazil.
*
Especially Brazil, where, Orkut informed me, a third of all the country's Internet traffic is still on the site that bears his name. When he visited Rio de Janeiro, he was recognized instantly and mobbed like a rock star. Brazilians bought computers for no reason other than to use the service he had built.
In the United States, however, orkut lagged. Two weeks after its launch, a student at Harvard introduced a social network for his classmates. He called it "The Facebook." Within six years that service would have half a billion users. Orkut continued to struggle to secure a toehold. The issue, according to most engineers I spoke with, was orkut's inability to scale to handle the influx of traffic from an audience the size of Google's, a task it had never been designed to do.
Paul Bucheit, the creator of Gmail, disagreed. The real reason was "Google's tech snobbery getting in the way of its success." Paul said orkut "was taking off. Lots of people signed up. And then it got really slow." But that was a problem other social networks had experienced as well—MySpace and even Facebook ran into capacity issues almost from the beginning. The difference, according to Paul, was that those services jumped in and did whatever it took to make things work. Facebook was just a bunch of college kids. It had no brilliant coders like Jeff Dean or Sanjay Ghemawat. And the final configuration of MySpace, which had hundreds of millions of users, wasn't much more sophisticated than what orkut had at its start.
"But at Google," according to Paul, "that wasn't how you did things." Because orkut had been written using Microsoft tools, Google's engineers deemed it "not scalable." "They turned their noses up at it and they didn't make the thing work. They just let it die. And by the time they managed to rewrite it in a way that was acceptable to the engineers at Google, it was already dead everywhere except for Brazil. Who knows? If they had actually done what was necessary to make it go, it could have been successful."
To launch a radically new product from an established company, Paul asserted, you needed someone who not only believed in it but also was able to make the organization "do the right stuff." Two months after orkut's launch, he would personally put that philosophy to the acid test.
I've never had much luck with email. For example, I had no idea that Microsoft Outlook had a two-gigabyte limit on how many messages I could save. I certainly didn't know that exceeding that amount would cause my inbox to explode and two years' worth of work to simply disappear. I found out, though, in 2002.
So I was receptive when Paul let me know he was working on an alternative to Outlook—a web-based email system he called Caribou—and asked if I'd like to try it out. I tried it, and it was pretty terrible. It didn't display well on my laptop, I couldn't sort messages from oldest to newest, and there was no way to select all the messages at once. Incredibly, there weren't even any folders for sorting mail by category. After a couple of weeks I told Paul, "Thanks, but no thanks," and went back to Microsoft Outlook.
A year later, I started hearing that Caribou had improved. Other Googlers were using it and not hating it, so I gave it another try. It still felt weak compared to Outlook, but it had some advantages. I could search through all my email quickly when I needed to find something, and it tied all my related messages together into an easily read thread. This time I stuck with it as Paul and a small team of engineers began prepping Caribou for launch as a Google product.
At the beginning of 2004, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft were the biggest players in online communication. They had created a balanced ecosystem of low expectations and commoditized email. Everyone knew web email came standard with a couple of megabytes of storage, inboxes littered with banner ads, and no easy way to find any message you had sent or received more than ten minutes earlier. Email addresses were disposable, and so many names had been claimed that almost everyone had to include a string of meaningless numbers in their user ID to open a new account. The major providers liked it that way and didn't want anyone rocking the boat. At one point during our negotiations to win the AOL contract, AOL had put terms into the deal specifying that Google could not do email. Before Google had to admit that might be a problem, AOL's own lawyers informed their negotiating team the language would violate anti-trust policies, so they pulled the wording.
According to Paul, fear of a radically new email system wasn't restricted to those outside the Googleplex. Some Googlers were so worried about how Microsoft might respond to Caribou, they proposed incorporating Microsoft's Passport identity-authentication system into our program. "Other engineers had so many complaints about Caribou that we had a meeting so they could list them all," Paul told me. "people were upset that we were using JavaScript. JavaScript was a huge mistake and we'd never get it to work. Just doing email was bad because we'd have to deal with spam, and all this data, and personal info, and security—anything you could imagine. Everything about Caribou was bad—that it even existed. Even right up to the launch, people were arguing we should just scrap the whole thing."
One positive asset Caribou did have was Georges Harik. Georges, as Paul describes him, was "an idea person," with a PhD in computer science, a background in machine learning, and relentless energy, which made him restless. And he had earned respect within engineering, especially from Larry, which made him priceless. "Ultimately," Paul said, "that's a really big advantage or liability for a project. What Larry thinks of the people involved."
Georges decided he would like to try product management for a while and became the product manager for Caribou. While he and Paul didn't always see eye-to-eye, Paul believed he was actually interested in shipping a product, not "playing power games." That kept the focus on the technology and steered the team away from damaging political conflicts that could delay the launch.
What I cared about was the name of the new service, the way we described it, and the date on which it launched. The choice of a name was complicated by our desire to have it tie to the Google brand but be faster to type than "Yahoo." The leading contender was "Gmail." The domain
gmail.com
was taken, though, and we were having a hard time connecting with the owners. Two weeks before the scheduled launch date, Rose Hagan, a Google attorney, tracked them down and offered them sixty-five thousand dollars. It was on the low end of what we were willing to pay, but more than they expected.
Gmail.com
was ours.
I was no longer the only one working on the text that would appear when the new product launched, though I insisted on reviewing every word to ensure we maintained Google's voice. Jonathan's product-management department had spawned a new position entitled APMM—associate product marketing manager—and the APMM assigned to Gmail was a hyperkinetic, hyper-focused Harvard grad named Ana Yang. Ana wrote copy, but she also thought strategically about the product's positioning, the reaction of users, and the perceptions of the press and our partners. She set up meetings, coordinated assignments, and worked closely with Georges to resolve issues. I could barely keep up with her. She sent out updates at two a.m., three a.m., and four a.m. in a single night. At one point I had to tell her that as important as Gmail was, I couldn't attend seven meetings about it in one week and still get my work done on the other projects I was juggling.
I looked at Ana and glimpsed my own mortality.
Product management was inexorably taking over the role of brand stewardship. The mass of Jonathan's world had grown so large, so quickly, that whole galaxies now tilted into its gravitational field. Things might have been different at a company like Procter and Gamble, which viewed its business from the outside looking in, searching the market for gaps between consumer desires and the products addressing them. Google looked at the world from the inside out. Engineers made products to their own specifications, not those of the consumers who would use them. If our technology found acceptance in the marketplace, great. If not, the technology was not inherently less worthy of being built. In a company where the products were the brand, brand management would become product marketing. I knew that was the natural order of things.
I still had a role, though, and I did my best to fill it. I positioned Gmail not as a better competitor to Yahoo mail, but as an entirely new way of thinking about communication. It wasn't just that we gave users a hundred times the storage capacity (one gigabyte) for free, but that we added a search capability that eliminated the need to manually file every email in a folder so it could be found again. It wasn't a home run compared with other email systems. It was an entirely new ball game.
The only remaining piece to be resolved was the launch date. In February 2004, Sergey suggested that we launch Gmail on April Fools' Day. It would be amusing to watch the press grapple with whether we meant it for real or as a joke. I didn't see the humor in playing our biggest new product launch for laughs. I told Sergey so and repeated my concerns at a launch review meeting in March attended by the Gmail team and the executive staff. Eric shared my concerns, and as CEO, he made a top-down decision. Given all the effort that had gone into creating Gmail and its potential to open up important new markets for Google, we would not make a joke out of the launch. Larry and Sergey argued that the joke was a Googley thing to do, but Eric was insistent. We could launch on April 1, but we would make it clear that Gmail was for real.
I hung around the meeting as it broke up and followed Eric out to the stairwell. "Thanks for that," I said to him as he climbed up toward his office. "You made the right decision. It has to be frustrating arguing with Larry and Sergey about such obvious things."
Eric stopped and looked at me. "I'm well compensated," he said with a smile. "Now please excuse me while I walk around the building a few times."
Thinking back to the weeks before Gmail launched, I'm amazed at how much we got done. I don't mean overcoming the technical challenges, which were mind-boggling, or resolving legal questions, which were Byzantine, or addressing partner-management issues, which were delicate—I mean just handling the elements lobbed into marketing's corner of the court.
Those elements would have kept us busy if we had been a startup focused only on the launch of one product, but the reality was that Google's product-release process had become a rolling-thunder operation of sustained, high-impact launches. Behind Gmail taxied personalized search, web alerts, local search, and "Total Recall," our code name for software that searched a user's PC files. Those products also required preparation that couldn't wait until Gmail was out the door.
I had my own projects, as well, including a nationwide engineer-recruitment campaign, a college promotion in Japan, an online tour of new Google features, and a response to users about JewWatch, an anti-Semitic hate site that we were showing as the top search result for the word "Jew." I felt my life shift into "bullet time," the effect from the
Matrix
movies, where everything slows to a crawl while the protagonist's perception of time expands, enabling him to see projectiles speeding toward him. I was operating at peak capacity. Every keystroke, every utterance, every thought moved me closer to my goal. I lost track of how much espresso I drank, but I remember being thankful that we had more than one machine, and that each one could make two cups at a time.
So the last thing I wanted to hear, five days before the launch of Gmail, was that we were going to make it a joke after all. It wouldn't be
the
April Fools' joke—we would go with my idea about a Google lunar office for that—but the executive staff had decreed we would do a hybrid announcement of sorts.
There would be a press release that was factual, but with enough humorous elements to leave people wondering if Gmail was for real. We would brief a few journalists in advance, but only on condition that they agreed to write funny stories about the launch. And we would incorporate the slogan Larry had come up with: "Gmail. It feels good."
Cindy was in Germany and largely offline, leaving PR Director David Krane to roll with the punches. "I knew we were going to be playing with people and challenging relationships if we shipped a communications vehicle written in such a way," he recalls. "Sergey insisted on it. I felt like we should hedge a little bit and deploy a few proven strategies in case things went haywire because our humor was misunderstood."