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"There wasn't any part that I couldn't change in under thirty seconds," Whitted remarked about his implementation of Gerald's idea. "That allowed us to have far fewer data-center technicians. The average in the U.S. is one tech per thirty machines. Google was running three thousand machines per tech because there was no box."

Gerald's expertise extended from the lowest level of the hardware to the software that ran on it, enabling him to identify savings others couldn't see. Despite that according to Whitted, "Gerald was hugely afraid of electricity. He was sure if he touched a thing with five volts on it he was going to be electrocuted."

"That never happened," Gerald insisted. He disputes most of the stories his former colleagues tell about him. He denies that a vendor dumped boxes of computer parts in our parking lot and just drove off when he realized he had sold them to us below his own cost. Bogdan Cocosel, who worked with Gerald on hardware, assured me that it did happen and that when they were tested, only half of the machines worked. Fortunately, Gerald had such a deep understanding of hardware that he knew how to salvage even problem parts.

There were other bargains to be had. When Google needed data-center space in Atlanta, Gerald approached the recently bankrupted company Cable and Wireless. He bought eighty million dollars' worth of equipment from them for a million and a half. He admitted to me that a ninety-five percent discount was a reasonably good deal.

Gerald dealt with numerous bankrupt data centers, though not all of them had reached that point before taking on Google's business. Exodus and GlobalCenter both hosted Google servers before sinking together under a sea of red ink. MCI WorldCom went out of business before they could sign their pending contract with Google. Gerald denies that he single-handedly drove data centers out of business. "The dot-com bubble burst. They had built all these data centers and couldn't fill them. They didn't realize they were in the real estate business." Besides, he explained, "I don't think I was a great negotiator. I only got eighty to ninety percent off list."

Urs gives him more credit than that: "Gerald understood the cost of ownership. Often, people didn't know what they were signing on the other side and were guaranteed to lose money. They should have known that power costs money and you can't just give it away. Or you do it once, but you don't do it twice—and they let us do it multiple times."

Gerald made a point of knowing everything about the companies with which he was negotiating, from their cost structures and breakeven points to the tariffs on their power bills. He knew what data centers had to pay for electricity even if they didn't, and he used that knowledge to Google's benefit. Other Googlers took advantage of Gerald's abilities to smooth over their own mistakes.

"I'm in front, cabling some of the machines to the switches," Jim Reese told me about a visit to Google's data center, "and all of a sudden I hear 'Zzzzt! Ahhhh!' I walk back and Harry [another early engineer] is just standing there, kind of dazed. We had fried the entire rack—all the RAM. RAM was difficult to get and very expensive, and we didn't have credit—I would drive down to Exodus with a half-million-dollar check in my hand so they'd offload the servers from the truck. We had Gerald convince the vendor the RAM was defective—because how could all three hundred and twenty sticks of RAM not work—right? So they replaced it all and sent it back to their manufacturer."

When I asked, Gerald disputed this account as well. There's something about him, though, that spawns such tales, perhaps because, as Urs described him, Gerald was "a very intense guy": "Sometimes people felt that he was angry, and he was just so energized about the problem that it appeared he was physically struggling with things." Because Urs felt Gerald was "an incredibly good match to what we needed," he protected him.

"Urs shielded me