I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [145]
Later, Studenmund stopped by our booth with a half dozen of her colleagues in tow. She wanted to chat. Did we think the event was worthwhile? A success? I candidly gave her as much misinformation as I could, and, after helping themselves to our tchotchkes, she and her entourage floated off. They didn't seem too concerned about us. We were just a hungry stray fighting a pack of others to eat the scraps of their success.
Then, on November 13, 2001, Overture dropped a bomb on Google. They were signing a five-month contract with Yahoo to deliver ads targeted to search keywords. Yahoo would keep paying us for our search results, but those results would be monetized by another company. They would skim the cream after we fed the cow and milked it. Larry and Sergey bit their tongues, but they were furious at the setback. They couldn't take it out on Yahoo, which was still our biggest partner, and bad-mouthing Overture would imply that Yahoo had made a mistake. There was no immediate engineering fix to our problem, but that didn't mean we had no way to respond.
We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident
While we couldn't talk trash about our competitors, we could use our site to talk directly to our users about the principles that made us unique. I had some thoughts about how to express that.
"Never settle for the best," I wrote, and quoted Larry's vision of the perfect search engine, which would "understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want." Only Google was engaged in an endless struggle for search perfection, I explained—a noble, perhaps quixotic goal that set us apart from portals laden with ancillary services, and from ad networks that put the interests of advertisers ahead of users.
To demonstrate Google's purity of heart, I compiled a list of "Ten Things We've Found to Be True." I tried to distill every interaction I'd had with our engineering team and with Larry and Sergey into discrete nodes that together mapped the attitudes of the company's creative force. I laid them out in priority order:
Focus on the user and all else will follow.
It's best to do one thing really, really well.
Fast is better than slow.
Open is better than closed.
Democracy on the web works.
You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
You can make money without doing evil.
There's always more information out there.
The need for information crosses all borders.
You don't need a suit to be serious.
Great just isn't good enough.
The fourth point stuck in Larry's craw. It described Google's preference for free, community-developed, open-source technology like Linux, which was increasingly viewed as a threat to the dominance of Microsoft's Windows operating system.
"Don't moon the giant," Larry admonished me. Larry, along with Netscapees like Omid, knew what came from waving red flags at the Beast of Redmond. Netscape had famously "mooned the giant" by boasting that their browser would turn Microsoft Windows into a "mundane collection of not entirely debugged device drivers." Microsoft had responded with their own version of "mooning." They bundled their Internet Explorer browser with Windows to turn Netscape into a barren, lifeless realm by "cutting off their air supply." Google's air supply was still coming through a rather narrow tube, and Microsoft could easily throw kinks into it by making changes to Internet Explorer or focusing on search themselves. I cut out point number four.
That brought the total number down to ten. I had intentionally included eleven because the last point went on to state that we would "always deliver more than expected." I tried to add another point to replace the deleted one, arguing that taking it to eleven would give the list a sort of postmodern, ironic hipness, but the executive staff said to let it go.