• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2115 0

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