I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [57]
"I hope we never repeat it," he admonished us. "Thank God this happened on a Friday night." There was only one silver lining Omid could see. Portal sites like Yahoo, who thought we might compete with them, would no longer worry about us. We clearly wouldn't be stealing their users with this kind of immature grab-ass idiocy. We weren't a Stanford dorm-room project anymore, Omid reminded us. We were running a serious business, and this came off like a beer-fueled freshman prank. I think he flashed back to his days at Netscape—a company high on its own hubris until a giant jackboot ground its face into reality.
"Not to worry, Omid," Sergey offered reassuringly. "We do foolhardy things from time to time, but not at random, and they usually have positive results."*
I pointed Omid to all the positive feedback from our users, but Cindy let me know I had blown it big time. Omid was a stakeholder and should have been in the loop. Another lesson learned the hard way. If nothing else, I consoled myself, at least this would give impetus to a more formal sign-off process. That would reel in the late-night GWS pushers and stop their off-key improvisations. As if.
Though no one else seemed to take a lesson from the MentalPlex mishap, I found an epiphany in the dust of the dying hubbub. I could build Google's brand from inside the product. I didn't need to rely on banner ads or postcard programs. Google's personality would shine through in the way we—the way I—talked with users. I could try anything, because the only ones looking over my shoulder were two guys noticeably lacking inhibitions. It was a liberating moment.
I owned Google's words. Now I would give them a voice.
Disorienting in the Extreme
Google time folded in on itself like a tempered samurai sword. So much activity took place simultaneously that the linear narrative of this book flattens the immersive 3D experience into an unrecognizable shape. Maybe if you tear out the pages, throw them in the air, and read from them randomly as they flutter down around you, you'll get a better feel for what it was like. I'd been at the company five months, and every hour of every day another neural pathway in my brain uprooted itself and traced a new route to an unexpected destination.
"I've drafted some lines we could put on the homepage," I told Larry and Sergey at a product review. "They should drive repeat traffic by reaffirming our quality to first-time users. Here's the list."
Sergey didn't look up from the new phone he appeared to be breaking into pieces.
"How are you defining first-time users?" Larry asked. "What if they have cookies turned off?" He glanced at the dozen rows of my text the projector pinned neatly against the screen. "Why don't you use the testimonial quote from Time magazine?" he asked before I could answer his first question. "I don't think any of these are going to be very effective."
Sergey raised his head to stare at Larry, who raised an eyebrow in response and spoke.
"You need to make these much more compelling. Like, 'If you printed out all the data Google searches, the stack of pages would reach from here to the moon.'"
Sergey smiled and leaned farther back in his chair.
"No," he said.
Larry's eyebrow shot up again and hovered at its apex.
"What we need to do," Sergey went on, "is test things that are totally random to see what has the biggest effect." His eyebrow called Larry's and raised it a quarter inch.
They stared silently at each other for a moment, their eyebrows dancing a pas de deux in a closed loop of telepathic communication. I sometimes thought I grokked Larry or understood where Sergey was coming from. Observing them together, though, was like trying to catch a glimpse of light in the thin patch of space between twin neutron stars. There was enormous energy being exchanged, but at a spectrum range I could not detect.
Sergey returned his attention to the disassembled phone. "You know what we should do?"