I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [147]
According to Amit Patel, Paul became disaffected with all the "corporate"-sounding suggestions his colleagues proposed—things like "Treat each other with respect," "Honor commitments," and "Don't be late for meetings." They were boring, and they were too specific. It was bad coding hygiene to build an itemized list if you could apply a general rule.
"Aren't all of these covered by, 'Don't be evil'?" Paul asked.
No one took him seriously. The meeting concluded with a list of eleven core values, which HR asked me to help wordsmith. "Don't be evil" wasn't one of them. The meeting left Amit unsatisfied, and he took it upon himself to proselytize the Word of Paul. Soon, "Don't be evil" began blemishing every markable surface like brown spots on ripening bananas. I had a rolling whiteboard in my cubicle, and one day when I came back from lunch, "Don't be evil" was neatly printed in one of its corners. I saw the phrase scrawled on conference room walls and twirling across laptop screensavers. Others saw it too. I had to assure job applicants, vendors, and visitors that it didn't mean the company was fighting Satanic urges.
It was intimidating to have a corporate commandment stare down at you wherever you went—a dry-erase Jiminy Cricket looking over your shoulder, passing judgment on your every action. That was Amit's intent. Its very simplicity made the phrase unforgettable and gave it the force of an irrevocable law.
"'Don't be evil,'" Paul explained, "is about not taking advantage of people or deceiving them. Anything deceptive is evil. So if we put up search results, move them higher because someone paid us, that's deceptive, that's abusing trust." Paul wanted Google to be the anti-evil company. Amit's marketing campaign sold the staff on formalizing the credo. Once it became a cultural meme, it was impossible to uproot. The effect was as if Amit had been scribbling with a permanent marker directly into our collective consciousness.
"I also thought it would be a good value because it would be difficult to remove once it was in," Paul admitted. "It wouldn't look too good to get rid of, 'Don't be evil.' Besides, Microsoft had a monopoly on evil. We didn't really want to compete."
The idea of not doing evil seeped into conversations as a criterion for evaluating products, services, and life decisions. People brought their own spin to interpreting what it meant:
"If the ads looked more like search results they would generate more revenue. But wouldn't that be evil?"
"Resist evil. Don't make the toolbar less functional to appease Microsoft."
"You took the last éclair and didn't finish it? You are evil incarnate."
"I've noticed that people have this strange definition of evil," Paul observed, "which is, 'Anything I don't like.' In my mind, I can not like something, but it can still not be evil." But even strict adherence to Paul's original concern about selling placement in search results put us at odds with our industry. If pay-for-placement was evil, the market was in league with the devil. Overture was growing at an enormous clip and building a sprawling advertising network of sites running their ads.*
When we posted "Ten Things We've Found to Be True" on our website, we earned a handful of kudos from users for our stand in favor of integrity. But that did nothing to slow the growth of Overture, a juggernaut that now threatened to lock up all the advertising dollars flowing to search.
Some Positive Results
Overture's deal with Yahoo seemed to put them out of any competitor's reach. In December 2001, they signed a three-year agreement with Germany's biggest ISP. In January 2002, MSN announced they were testing Overture ads. They were everywhere and they were unstoppable.
Except. Except that by January 2002, Googlers had