I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [200]
Cindy was in Germany and largely offline, leaving PR Director David Krane to roll with the punches. "I knew we were going to be playing with people and challenging relationships if we shipped a communications vehicle written in such a way," he recalls. "Sergey insisted on it. I felt like we should hedge a little bit and deploy a few proven strategies in case things went haywire because our humor was misunderstood."
David recommended letting a few trusted journalists and analysts in on the joke, so the day of the announcement we could refer people to them with questions about Gmail's potential impact on the industry. "No way!" he remembers Sergey telling him. "It's a joke. We want to surprise everybody. No way. Absolutely no way. Categorically, no."
Meanwhile, Dennis Hwang spent the day before the launch coming up with ideas for a logo and trying to make it work in conjunction with the clown-colored Google brand. I suggested he make Google gray and let the Gmail logo carry the corporate colors. Even after four years at Google, I found it astounding that one twenty-something guy was sitting alone at his desk, sipping tea and developing the main branding element for a product to be used by millions of people—the night before it was scheduled to launch.
That's when Sergey stopped by to ask if we were making a mistake launching Gmail as a joke. I had assured him many times before that it was, but now, after running so hard to make it happen, I began to have doubts. "No," I said. "It's not a mistake. It's funny, but I think it's a missed opportunity. If people think it's a joke, they might not take it seriously when we tell them it's real." That didn't persuade him, as I knew it wouldn't. We chatted a few minutes more, then he wandered off.
Other cracks appeared as the pressure built in the final hours. There were miscommunications and dropped balls. Issues with version control on documents. Frantic revisions. Some bad assumptions. I apologized to our growing team of writers for being cranky and assured them they were doing great work. More worrisome, several engineers argued that the service itself wasn't ready. Paul pleaded for more servers to add capacity.
"We launched it with a couple hundred machines," he told me later. "We launched it with almost no hardware. We were able to support Googlers and a handful of other people. That thing we launched just barely existed."
At four p.m. on March 31, the press release went out. The Rubicon had been crossed.
The phones in the PR department started ringing almost instantly. Once reporters got beyond annoyance at the ambiguity of our announcement, they were impressed. Their stories the next day were positive. We had dodged a bullet. Cindy was thrilled with the new breezy tone and style of our press communications, though she thought it unfortunate that we had rolled it out on April Fools'.
On the first day, a quarter of a million users put their names on the waiting list for Gmail accounts.
Then things started to go sideways.
Reporters complained to Cindy that we had mishandled the announcement. A journalist friend of hers had assured people it was a joke and been embarrassed to be proven wrong. Even more than most people, reporters don't like to be proven wrong. Cindy was taking considerable flak, but that was hardly the worst of it.
The ads in Gmail, targeted to the content of messages in the inbox, freaked people out. They didn't like it that Gmail was going to read their mail to serve them targeted ads. They called it "creepy" and an invasion of their privacy. Stories started showing up on TV and the Internet about Google's scary new email system. Conan O'Brien joked about it in his monologue. Why was Google even getting into email in the first place? Google was a search engine. Those who had urged the government to punish the advertising company DoubleClick for tracking users' online behavior