"Google's
Endless Summer."
By Andrew Goodman
A recent tour of Google headquarters (Aug. 13),
and a highly cordial meeting with staff responsible for their
advertising programs, offered me palpable confirmation: This is
a young company on top of the world but taking nothing for granted.
The Googlers’ enthusiastic hosting of that evening’s
Google Dance bash, enjoyed by hundreds of attendees of the Search
Engine Strategies conference, ranked Google high on life’s
intangibles, as well.
In a previous article I polled some industry
watchers in attempt to figure out why this Google thing just kept
on happening. Some pointed directly to the technology, others
argued in favor of timing, still others claimed it was the clean
home page and singular focus that made Google a hit.
Fast forward precisely one year. Mainstream publications like
Fortune magazine (in a glossy reprint that Googlers were handing
out at the conference) are now singing Google’s praises
louder than ever. The head-scratching analysis (and over-analysis)
hasn’t abated. Fortune made much of the server hardware
advantage underlying Google’s success – a point that’s
been made before, but one that continues to capture observers’
imagination perhaps to an excessive degree (but like the phony
eBay Pez Dispenser tale, it’s been an important part of
developing a lore). And we’re now seeing more media talk
about search engine business strategy, even if Google’s
mathematicians and engineers mainly just wanted to create a cool
product that worked fast.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the
media’s love affair with Google has been bemusing to watch;
each writer seems to see in Google what they want to see. The
major financial press wait impatiently for an IPO; Wired writes
(less than a year ago) that Google is “geek-beloved”
(hey, it’s not just for geeks anymore) and rails against
Google’s supposed mishandling of its acquisition of the
Usenet archive from Deja – a temporary controversy if there
ever was one.
Sometimes one really can overthink things. Although usability
studies have been at the foundation of many of Google’s
more recent user-interface refinements (as they have been at companies
like Yahoo! and Terry Lycos), as Marissa Mayer of Google pointed
out in her talk at the SES conference, the initial clean look
was simply the result of one of the Google co-founders’
conviction that “we’re not web designers and I don’t
do HTML.”
As for technology, no question, Google has a great search engine.
At the same time, they’re not the only ones who do. And
the serious shortcomings in its offerings in the not-so-distant
past – such as the inability to properly search phrases
– might have been enough to sink a less-charmed ship. We’ve
already been over the terrain before: AltaVista’s Raging
Search, a direct attempt to compete with Google’s clean
look and feel, could have triumphed in a different set of circumstances.
AV had just burned too many chances, and its attempts to reinvigorate
its search focus didn’t make a dent in the marketplace.
The endless search for the causes of Google’s success may
be an exercise in hyper-rationality. For all I know, it’s
witchcraft.
The current business successes of Google are undeniable. It’s
managing to make a buck while maintaining the integrity of its
search index. Very early on into the ramp-up of its AdWords Select
and Premium Sponsorship programs (to go alongside other revenue
streams from enterprise search), Google is reportedly profitable
and making better revenues than eBay was at a similar stage of
development. July’s comScore Media Metrix report of US Internet
usage puts Google at a shocking #4, behind only the three major
portals AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, and ahead of Terra Lycos (and everybody
else).
With profitability and ownership of a massive daily user base
comes a measure of autonomy. The usual suspects in the financial
media can’t smugly micromanage a profitable privately-held
technology company that can delay going public as long as it wishes.
Google is not betting the entire farm on selling its search technology
or keyword-based advertising results to portal partners, since,
in the worst-case scenario, Google can fall back on monetizing
its own heavy traffic.
Working at Google (as with many ultra-youthful Internet startups,
most of whose day seems to have come and gone) is surely a singular
experience. Brightly colored exercise balls, lava lamps, and goofy
cereal dispensers are just the beginning. As employee #149 (an
oldtimer as the headcount approaches 500) shows us around a bit
more, we get to see various wacky-but-factual meters, charts,
and prototypes all chronicling some aspect of Google’s past
or current performance. We hustle past the legal department (“not
that interesting”) and the finance department (“not
that interesting, either”). In the parlance of organizational
sociology, the company’s dominant coalition is engineers,
with a significant and fast-growing add-on, the advertising salespeople,
business development personnel, and the customer support reps
whose job it is to keep advertisers happy. Inevitably, the organizational
culture will shift to better achieve revenue targets, but it seems
improbable that the place will become top-heavy with management.
So far, it’s working.
One of the founders’ offices shows further evidence of “street
cred” lurking in the bowels of America’s #4 web property:
a wastebasket filled with worn-down hockey sticks suitable for
street hockey or perhaps roller hockey. One Googler wears an oversized
white hockey jersey with a big Google logo on it. Hmm, just enough
Canadiana there to whet my whistle, but without the lousy winters.
I start mentally calculating the cost-benefit of relocating. I’d
have to start cheering for the San Jose Sharks. More frequent
visits, at least, I decide.
New recruits don’t take it for granted. One paused when
it was remarked that his shot at being hired was probably 500
to 1 at best. He thought about that, and suddenly two months ago
seemed like an eternity ago to him, even if the pay here for entry-level
jobs can’t be that great. “This sure beats where I
was when I applied for this job: unemployment… and starving.”
Like any other job. Except this one’s at Google, Inc.
The much-vaunted integration of work and play in the working lives
of employees at companies like Google seems to defy conventional
management thinking. Surely more money and the development of
world-beating technology mean more work, and less play? Isn’t
this a market economy, where everything has its price –
an economy in which there are *trade-offs* and disastrous consequences
for those who think they can have it all? Won’t Google get
eaten alive eventually by a more sober, rational, sane competitor
who eats her cereal at home? Is one late-forties CEO really enough
adult supervision to keep this bunch focused? Didn’t someone
say that they don’t even *have* a CFO?
Not so long ago I was teaching a university course in public policy
wherein the authors of a piece on unorthodox management and decision-making
models used Apple as an example of a company whose innovations
never would have happened unless play was incorporated into the
founders’ daily work. People tend not to buy into these
kinds of ideas when they hear them for the first time. Parents
who have saved every time to send their kids to a good school
don’t want their future management material learning that
play is good. A few students nearly dropped my course that week,
all because of that article. Much of the world is still eager
to sign on with an established bureaucracy.
One thing’s certain – once a person gets used to thinking
beyond and around tradeoffs, it’s tough to go back. Unorthodox
ways of working shouldn’t be seen as *causes* of Google’s
success any more than any other single causal factor, like red
exercise balls, powerful server hardware, or, for that matter,
youth. But they certainly seem to be a good fit for now.
If youth were the cause of Google’s success, what might
that say about the future? As one industry veteran remarked, most
everyone at Google seems to be in their twenties, whereas LookSmart’s
core group are in their thirties and AltaVista’s perhaps
even older than that. Does this mean Google will become the victim
of a “life cycle?” Will 2002 be fondly remembered
as the high point, the day in the sun? When will Googlers start
looking as tired as the rest of us feel?
Why try to write history while there is still so much future left?
And just a little bit of summer left, we hope.
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