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Chapter 18

Mail Enhancement and Speaking in Tongues

USER SUPPORT STARTED the year 2001 with eight thousand unanswered emails. Even after the Deja News furor passed, the number again crept up to ten thousand, in part because of an orchestrated campaign to add Catalan to Google's list of interface languages.

Larry and Sergey strongly hinted we should look for an alternative to our customer-relationship management company, Miasma, which continued to hinder rather than enhance productivity. "I don't want to start looking for a new CRM vendor," I warned them, "if we're just going to pick the cheapest one at the end of the road. That's how we got in this situation to begin with. It's better to stay with the devil we know than to start over with a new set of problems."

Miasma had just released a software update. I let their sales rep know that we would order a copy, but that Larry and Sergey wouldn't pay the five-thousand-dollar cost of flying their techs out to install it.

The sales rep was taken aback. "You don't want us to install it? You know, this is a completely new version, not a service pack. It's very complex. We'd strongly recommend against a self-install."

"We have a building full of engineers," I rejoined. "They're confident they can do it themselves. Just send us the disks and the documentation."

"Well, frankly, only one other customer asked to do it themselves and they gave up halfway through. We'll have to pull some documentation together for you."

I wasn't nearly as worried by that as I should have been. I had developed unquestioning faith that there was no task beyond the capabilities of Google engineers. The disks arrived in the mail. The installation did not go as planned.

"We are rapidly approaching a major email meltdown," I advised our executive staff ten days later. The wheels had come off and we were grinding along on sparking rims toward the edge of a very deep canyon. The program kept crashing and the database of incoming emails was leaking bits and bytes at an alarming rate. Miasma's corporate headquarters was not taking our calls, and my sales rep's phone message said she had left the company. It was the email apocalypse.

Two days later, our Miasma server stopped accepting inbound mail.

I accelerated plans to find another email solution, though I had no budget or parameters for the search.

Composing a list of new CRM vendors didn't take long. Fewer than half a dozen major players offered stable, well-tested systems. Google's tech evaluation team would ensure we weren't sold a bill of goods (though they hadn't kept us from choosing Miasma), and Larry had a college friend who would advise us on desirable features. The friend, David Jeske, counseled us on what to ask for, then added that, by the way, he and a buddy were building a CRM product called Trakken—if we were interested. It wasn't really finished yet, but Larry's other Stanford pals at Wunderground.com were using it.

Interested? Interested in an untested CRM product still in development with one tiny client? Created by a company of two people? Sure, that's just what I was looking for—another risky technology with no support and no track record behind it. I thanked David for his help and, because he was a friend of Larry's, assured him we'd be happy to send him our request for proposal.

Meanwhile, our real search was well under way. One vendor couldn't provide any support for non-English email. Another had a terrible UI because it was a first-generation product. A third seemed overpriced and their salesman's aggressive stance made us wary of doing business with them. Only one company offered a reasonable solution, and we began negotiating with them in earnest. With our leading contender scheduled to make a presentation to our finance, operations, and sales departments, I felt confident I could convince Larry and Sergey to loosen the purse strings and do it right this time: spend money for a high-quality, stable system from a respected vendor.

I hoped Larry's friend had taken the hint and