I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [198]
According to Paul, fear of a radically new email system wasn't restricted to those outside the Googleplex. Some Googlers were so worried about how Microsoft might respond to Caribou, they proposed incorporating Microsoft's Passport identity-authentication system into our program. "Other engineers had so many complaints about Caribou that we had a meeting so they could list them all," Paul told me. "people were upset that we were using JavaScript. JavaScript was a huge mistake and we'd never get it to work. Just doing email was bad because we'd have to deal with spam, and all this data, and personal info, and security—anything you could imagine. Everything about Caribou was bad—that it even existed. Even right up to the launch, people were arguing we should just scrap the whole thing."
One positive asset Caribou did have was Georges Harik. Georges, as Paul describes him, was "an idea person," with a PhD in computer science, a background in machine learning, and relentless energy, which made him restless. And he had earned respect within engineering, especially from Larry, which made him priceless. "Ultimately," Paul said, "that's a really big advantage or liability for a project. What Larry thinks of the people involved."
Georges decided he would like to try product management for a while and became the product manager for Caribou. While he and Paul didn't always see eye-to-eye, Paul believed he was actually interested in shipping a product, not "playing power games." That kept the focus on the technology and steered the team away from damaging political conflicts that could delay the launch.
What I cared about was the name of the new service, the way we described it, and the date on which it launched. The choice of a name was complicated by our desire to have it tie to the Google brand but be faster to type than "Yahoo." The leading contender was "Gmail." The domain gmail.com was taken, though, and we were having a hard time connecting with the owners. Two weeks before the scheduled launch date, Rose Hagan, a Google attorney, tracked them down and offered them sixty-five thousand dollars. It was on the low end of what we were willing to pay, but more than they expected. Gmail.com was ours.
I was no longer the only one working on the text that would appear when the new product launched, though I insisted on reviewing every word to ensure we maintained Google's voice. Jonathan's product-management department had spawned a new position entitled APMM—associate product marketing manager—and the APMM assigned to Gmail was a hyperkinetic, hyper-focused Harvard grad named Ana Yang. Ana wrote copy, but she also thought strategically about the product's positioning, the reaction of users, and the perceptions of the press and our partners. She set up meetings, coordinated assignments, and worked closely with Georges to resolve issues. I could barely keep up with her. She sent out updates at two a.m., three a.m., and four a.m. in a single night. At one point I had to tell her that as important as Gmail was, I couldn't attend seven meetings about it in one week and still get my work done on the other projects I was juggling.
I looked at Ana and glimpsed my own mortality.
Product management was inexorably taking over the role of brand stewardship. The mass of Jonathan's world had grown so large, so quickly, that whole galaxies now tilted into its gravitational field. Things might have been different at a company like Procter and Gamble, which viewed its business from the outside looking in, searching the market for gaps between consumer desires and the products addressing them. Google looked at the world from the inside out. Engineers made products to their own specifications, not those of the consumers who would