Ken Auletta - Googled - The End of the World as We Know It

But in their rush to fulfill this mission, Google did not first pause to extensively consult with American publishers and authors who owned the copyrights to many of these books. “If we had done that,” Brin said, “we might not have done the project.” Because they didn’t do that, Google would later have a lawsuit to contend with.

THE FOUNDERS USUALLY FOCUS on different things. Page devotes more time to how consumers interact with Google, hence his chosen title, president of products. Brin spends more time on technology, hence his title, president of technology. The titles can be misleading, because “we overlap a lot,” said Brin. It’s also inexact because each founder has unpredictable interests or quirks. Brin, for example, thrusts himself into the middle of strategy sessions for many business negotiations, which is welcomed by his fellow executives. He is also a principal proponent, according to vice president of people operations Laszlo Bock, of Google’s massage programs and child care centers, while Page is more assertive about which engineers to hire, the food served, and the size of cafeterias. Within Google, this sometimes creates confusion. For example, Bill Campbell, who is in many of the key meetings, said he believes Brin is most focused “on the end user experience” and that Page is more focused on “the product development process to get there.” On the other hand, employee number 1, Craig Silverstein, thinks Brin “brings more of an operational focus.”

“We’re pretty lucky because we have both of us plus Eric,” said Brin. “We are able to choose the things to focus on. It’s a great luxury.” Because “I can’t escape being a bit of a tech nerd,” Brin said, he spends a lot of time on technology. But so does Page. “These things are subtle. We overlap a lot.”

What both bring, said Nick Fox, the group business manager, ads quality, is “an ability to push you down paths you wouldn’t have thought about before.” When Fox first joined Google and watched Page and Brin at TGIF, “I thought they must be two guys who had a great idea and got lucky.” But he quickly concluded they always had “great insights,” and an ability to provoke thought. He offers this example: They were in a meeting discussing new ways to advertise with search and how to move beyond the text ads Google relied upon. Brin was holding a plastic bottle of water, and said, “Let’s turn this bottle upside down. If I’m a butcher and I’m trying to get customers into my store, maybe a text ad is not an effective way to get customers into my store. But maybe if I was able to film a video of myself showing all the fresh food and great prices and I’m just talking about my store with a lot of passion, maybe this is the way I can get people to come into my store.” It was not the typical auto dealer ad announcing a President’s Day sale, Fox said. “You don’t think about ads of people talking passionately about their store.” For various reasons, such ads are still not part of search, but to Fox that is less important than the ability of the founders to “turn the way people think about something upside down.”

Alissa Lee encountered this upside-down approach. In the first five years of Google’s life, one or both founders insisted on interviewing each applicant. Brin was introduced to a Harvard Law graduate, Alissa Lee, by David Drummond, who was the company’s outside counsel in the late nineties and became Google’s corporate counsel in 2002. Lee was a contracts lawyer, and in the course of her interview, Drummond remembers, Brin said, “‘I really need to see how you will practice law. I need you to draw me a contract. Don’t spend a lot of time on it. Draft it and send it to me and to David so we can review your work.’” And then came the Google test: “‘I need the contract to be for me to sell my soul to the devil.’” Brin remembered his request and recalled: “I just figured that if I’m interviewing an attorney I should validate their work product.”

Lee remembered repeating the question, not sure she had heard it correctly. Brin told her he wanted the contract e-mailed to him in the next thirty minutes. “Amid the surreal oddity of it all,” she recalled, “I had forgotten to ask him all sorts of lawyerly questions, like what sort of protections he needed, what conditions he wanted to attach, and what he wanted in return for his soul. But then I realized that I had missed the point. He was looking for someone who could embrace a curveball, even relish it, and thrive in the process of tackling something unexpected. I’m not sure he actually looked at what I sent him, but something in my crazy sale agreement or in my response must have satisfied him.”

“She was a clear hire,” said Drummond. Today Lee is Google’s associate general counsel.

John Doerr encountered a similar upside-down approach when Page asked him what he thought of Google’s buying a Boeing 767.

“I think that’s a terrible idea,” said Doerr.

“Why?”

“For the ethos and egalitarian nature you want to have in the company,” Doerr answered, “you’re never going to get away from the public perception of two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs owning a personal 767.”

“Look at the numbers,” Page said, showing Doerr a sheet of paper revealing that for seven million dollars they could purchase the 767, and for another ten million dollars they could install improved engines and a new interior. “A totally upgraded 767,” Doerr realized, “cost less than a G-5.” And it could fly longer distances and accomodate thirty-five people, transporting engineers and the founders or Schmidt around the world to visit Google sites. “They went ahead and did it.” They later purchased an additional plane, a Boeing 757.

WITH INTENSE PRODDING from the founders, the Google engineering shop was innovating at a furious pace. Among the new projects developed at this time were Desktop Search, Froogle (later changed to Google Product Search), Google Maps, Google Print (renamed Google Book Search), Google Docs, to allow users to create and edit documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, and Pyra Labs, a site to facilitate the creation of blogs. The founders were particularly enthusiastic about the idea for a new e-mail system. Unlike providers such as AOL, Google’s e-mail would be free, and would allow its users to easily search their own e-mail archives for content and contact names. And while Yahoo’s free e-mail offered its users 4 megabytes of storage, Google’s Gmail would provide 1 gigabyte, 250 times as much. To the engineers, it seemed clear that this was enough storage that a user would never have to delete e-mails. In the interest of efficiency, the first version of Gmail did not include a delete button. This had an unforeseen effect: Users feared that Google would peek at e-mails. And Paul Buchheit’s e-mail scanning software-the same program that had grown into AdSense-only fanned this fear. For Google, it was a way to make money from e-mail by placing ads when certain keywords were typed. But critics said it was an invasion of privacy, that Big Brother was watching everything. Google’s engineers failed to absorb the lesson of Microsoft’s Passport program. Introduced in 1999, the program stored personal information and allowed access via a log-in name and password. Its release triggered a storm of protests, complaints that Microsoft would access this personal data for its own business reasons. Perhaps a reason Google failed to absorb the lessons of Passport was because Google believed its intentions were noble and that Microsoft’s were probably not.

Terry Winograd, the Stanford professor, was a consultant on Gmail and described a “huge debate” over the program. “We said, ‘People want to delete things. There should be a delete.’ Larry, among others, said, ‘We want them to start thinking differently.’” Page said that because Google was offering so much storage, users could keep everything, and went on to argue: “If you delete stuff, you might later on decide you want it. Plus, you spend time thinking about whether I should delete this or not.” The “engineering optimization side,” said Winograd, claimed this was an inefficient use of users’ time.