I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [27]
"Great job," Sergey responded. "This is a good starting place." True, he disputed most of my supporting arguments, but he administered no gut shot that left my plan writhing on the floor spilling its insights. Larry was more reserved, but he liked the questions I was asking and thought the idea of Google Fellows was "cool."†
Sergey quibbled with my assertion that speed would not be an important differentiator as everyone moved to broadband connections. "Speed is an issue for me," he said, "and I have a cable modem at home. If search engines were faster and better, they could be integrated into your thought process." He saw Google becoming an invisible component in every user's decision-making, not just a tool for finding a particular fact. Apparently "brain integration" was one of our hitherto undisclosed corporate goals.
He also discounted my conclusion that we needed to add targeted services to steal page views away from the big portals. "Nonfunctionality is a feature," he instructed me. "We don't need to increase page views by adding products." Larry and Sergey always thought in terms of scale. Sergey saw that there was a far greater gap between the total numbers of users visiting each portal than there was between the numbers of pages visitors viewed once they were at a portal. The winner in search wasn't going to be the site generating a few extra clicks from the users it already had; it was going to be the site with the most users overall. Google, Sergey had decided, would be the latter.
The Only Way to Win
Having a marketing plan on the way to approval gave me some comfort. No matter how innovative our product was, eventually others would match it. It was the normal course of business. On that day, marketing would be needed to create a clear choice for consumers. On that day, I would step forward and proclaim, "I'm ready to get up and do my thing."
That day would never come.
It wasn't because Google was lead dog from the get-go and never looked back. "We weren't in the lead," Urs said about the early days. "Google was this tiny company and AltaVista and Inktomi were huge in comparison. Inktomi had a cage in the same data center, twenty times bigger than Google's. Much nicer. They had their logo on the wall. We were a toy company trying to do something new. Our ranking was better, but we were way slower than Inktomi. We could barely keep up and they had a hundred times the traffic we did."
It's just as well I hadn't realized how fragile Google truly was as I set up the meeting to discuss next steps for my marketing plan. It might have imbued me with false confidence that my proposal held all the answers. Instead, I knew I would have to justify spending on each of the steps I had outlined. I started down the list of reasons we needed to implement the plan and why we needed to do it with some urgency.
"The most important thing to consider," I began, "is that our own internal research shows our competitors are beginning to approach Google's level of quality. In a world where all search engines are equal, we'll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from everyone else."
The room grew quiet.
I looked around nervously. Had I said something wrong? Yes. Not just wrong, but heretical to engineers who believed anything could be improved through iterative application of intelligence. Larry made my apostasy clear.
"If we can't win on quality," he said quietly, "we shouldn't win at all." In his view, winning by marketing alone would be deceitful, because it would mean people had been tricked into using an inferior service against their own best interests. It would be nobler to take arms against our sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.
To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before
The 1999 Google holiday party was a grad student affair with folding chairs and a few dozen folks crammed into a room decorated with whiteboards. Because of problems in the kitchen, the food was late