I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [189]
By the end of the next year, the amount of cash needed for the bonuses became unwieldy. Armored cars and shotgun-toting guards were needed to transport and watch over the funds until they could be distributed.
There was more good financial news in 2003. The slides at TGIF showing our corporate financial health kept pointing up and to the right. The board split our stock when it hit ten dollars a share in June.
Of course, we still faced competition, but we had momentum. Overture had bought the search engine company FAST in February to compete with us, but they were clearly too late to catch up on that front. We were not happy, but also not surprised, when Yahoo bought Overture in July for $1.3 billion. Now Yahoo owned the patents Overture had accused Google of infringing, which meant we would soon be in court with one of our biggest customers. The handwriting had been on the wall. Google had grown too big and threatening to be Yahoo's supplier. They would have to compete with us, and to do that they needed their own search-advertising technology.
More disconcerting was Microsoft's awakening to the power of search. "Google's a very nice system," Windows group VP Jim Allchin told the Seattle Times in February 2003, "but compared to my vision, it's pathetic."*
The threat to Google was real. If Allchin's vision included integrating search into the new version of Windows Microsoft was soon to release, it could eliminate the need to launch a browser and go to Google to search. Given the number of Windows users worldwide, our traffic could drop in a hurry. Without traffic, we would show fewer ads and make less money. Way less money.
"We will buy you," was Microsoft's ploy when it came to startups that threatened them, "or we will bury you." Google was not for sale. Nor would Google be foolish enough to partner with Microsoft, exposing our technology to them in ways that would let them "harvest" it and use it against us.† One business-development person warned me that Microsoft's MO as a company was to get close to startups, suck them dry, and then throw them away. Microsoft was methodical about it, giving generous terms to keep the startups alive, but essentially turning them into captive research-and-development centers. Microsoft would become the startups' biggest customer and thereby drive the direction of their development, perhaps offering to provide informal technical help, which necessitated a look at the startups' proprietary code.
When Microsoft turned its gaze to us, Larry and Sergey huddled with our board of directors and determined to stay the course. There was fear, but no panic. To survive—as companies like Intuit, AOL, and Oracle had in direct competition with the Redmond giant—we needed to focus on our core strengths: search quality, a comprehensive ad network, and content targeting. And the key tactic for implementing that strategy was one we had been employing from the very beginning: hire brilliant engineers to do brilliant things.
First we needed to prevent Microsoft from luring away any of the talent we had already found. That might be difficult as stock options vested for the earliest engineers and Google grew larger and more bureaucratic. On the plus side, most engineers would not view a move to Microsoft as an improvement in management streamlining. It was Cindy who raised the question to me of how we might help engineering find more talent,