I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [155]
Omid was not amused. He knew the perception was spreading that Google was not a friend of portal sites, especially since we were now openly seeking partners not just for search results but also for ad distribution. Sergey turned to marketing for data proving the perception false. We couldn't find any, though I spent months looking.
Our Earthlink win had cracked the icy stasis locking the search players in place. Suddenly conventional certainty was set adrift. Google had entered a new industry and won an account from a firmly ensconced leader. We had flawlessly implemented a substantial and complex advance in our back-end systems and transitioned from one economic model to another. Those accomplishments could easily have absorbed the full focus of a competent tech company for years. It was becoming clear that Google was more than just a competent tech company.
At the tail end of 2001, I had convened a group at Cindy's request to begin thinking about Google's evolving position in the marketplace. Since then, Susan, Sheryl Sandberg, Cindy, and a couple of other marketeers had gathered every few weeks to try and pin down Google's protean essence. We called our initiative "Baby Beagle," in homage to Darwin. Our corporate identity had morphed with our entry into ads syndication—but into what? We didn't want to be pegged as a portal, but we had outgrown the notion of being only a search engine.
Our group couldn't reach consensus. It was like the old story of sightless men describing an elephant by touching its leg, its trunk, its back. I needed to talk to someone who saw the whole picture. I needed to talk to Larry. The hour I spent with him and Sergey probing their vision for Google gave me my best look at their motivations and aspirations for the company. Cindy was the only other person in the room. It wasn't a press interview. They had no reason to shade their views or filter their thoughts. They expressed what they truly and deeply believed.
We spent the first fifteen minutes talking about what Google was not and what we would never do. Larry wanted Google to be "a force for good," which meant we would never conduct marketing stunts like sweepstakes, coupons, and contests, which only worked because people were stupid. Preying on people's stupidity, Larry declared, was evil.
We wouldn't mislead people like our partner Yahoo, which at the time was experimenting with a pay-for-inclusion program that sold placement in their results. Google wouldn't treat employees badly or sell products that worked poorly. We wouldn't waste people's time—a point Larry emphasized again and again.
We need to do good, he said. We need to do things that matter on a large scale. Things that are highly leveraged. When I asked for examples, he mentioned micro-credits in Bangladesh and the Rocky Mountain Institute and talked about changing business systems to make them environmentally friendly while saving money. He also talked about distributed computing, drug discovery, and making the Internet faster. And that wasn't all.
We should be known for making stuff that people can use, he said, not just for providing information. Information is too restrictive. In fact, we shouldn't be defined by a category, but by the fact that our products work—the way you know an Apple product will look nice and a Sony product will work better but cost more. We're a technology company. A Google product will work better.
We don't make promises and then break them.
If we did have a category, it would be personal information—handling information that is important to you. The places you've seen. Communications. We'll add personalization features to make Google more useful. People need to trust us with their personal information, because we have a huge amount of data now and will