I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [113]
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.
Post Apocalypse
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