It was hard to miss the shift in decision-making authority away from the UI team, where all members ostensibly had equal votes, to the product team, over which Marissa now held sway.
I saw it firsthand in working with Marissa on the language our site would use to describe Google news. As was often the case, the wording was still being finalized the night before the product launch. Marissa wanted to emphasize the automated nature of Google news by saying, "No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page." To me it sounded awkward and, worse, like a slap in the face to the journalists and editors whose stories we would be aggregating. I heard its tone as implying, "Look! We've built a machine that does your job better than you! You're not needed anymore, so why don't you take your Pulitzers and Polks and put yourselves out to pasture?"
Marissa didn't hear it that way. She found the reference to animal testing irresistibly humorous, though I pointed out to her that no humans were harmed in the creation of a printed newspaper either. "It's amusing," I conceded, though I didn't really believe it, "but it's going to wear thin very quickly. A lot of folks won't get it at all."
It all balanced out, though. Marissa was equally unhappy with the language I had written into the FAQ explaining Google news: "Google news is highly unusual in that it offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. Google employs no editors, managing editors, executive editors, or other ink-stained wretches."
She grimaced at "ink-stained wretches," a phrase I knew, from my seven years working at a newspaper, was a term of endearment among journalists. "It's a badge of honor," I assured her, "a tip of the hat to them to show we're on their side."
She polled the engineering team working on news, and they all hated it. Schwim, the ops guy, chimed in that he found it insulting. When the first iteration of Google news rolled out the next morning, "ink-stained wretches" was out and "no humans harmed" was in.
The "no humans harmed" line got noticed by the press. Some of the attention was positive, some not. Almost all the news reports I saw categorized the statement as boastful. Some also referred to the suffering of "ink-stained editors" who now would find their jobs threatened. I didn't point out that our critics had applied the "ink-stained" appellation to themselves without our prompting. Even years later, the line, which only stayed up a couple of weeks, is well remembered by journalists. When Google news began experimenting with adding human editors in June 2010, Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle noted that our "no humans harmed" wording had "never made those of us who are, for the most part, human editors feel all that great."*
I can't honestly claim that my version would have been perceived any differently. It could very well have been much worse. The notion of automated news selection put journalists of all stripes on edge, and would have done so even if we hadn't placed any text explaining it on the site. What struck me, though, was my inability to persuade Marissa to see my point of view. And whenever that happened, Marissa's perspective prevailed.
By Any Other Name
Google news wasn't the only new product in the hopper. We had a product-search service scheduled to launch before the end of 2002 as well. The product team had assigned it the code name "Froogle."
"I was hoping you could help us out with a tagline for Froogle for the launch," Pearl Renaker, the PM for the new product, said to me in late August 2002.
"I'd love to," I told her, but thought to myself, "Uh-oh." It occurred to me that I had not been in any discussions about the "real" name that would replace "Froogle" when it went live. I suddenly got the feeling that the code name was no longer just a code name. Pearl confirmed it.
"We'd like to brand it as Froogle, but position it as a brand extension of Google." It was still a couple of months until launch. I had time to explain all the reasons that was a really bad idea.
My objections to naming our new feature "Froogle" were grounded in the brand architecture I had worked out with Salar, but more important, in Google's tradition of "underpromise and overdeliver." Salar and I had agreed when we launched the Google directory in 2000 that new products would all be under the Google name and just have descriptive titles: Google directory, Google image search, Google news. Froogle would be the first product to break that mold and set up an independent brand. Essentially, it would be saying that Google was no longer the one place to go for all searches. Users would have to choose one brand or the other. And it would set a dangerous precedent for future brand proliferation. Would we now create a name for every new service we developed?
I did see advantages to establishing an independent brand as a platform for commerce-related services. If Froogle was being positioned as a competitor to Amazon, with shopping carts and buyer reviews and one-click technology, it might make sense to give it its own Google-derived identity. But Froogle wasn't up to that challenge.
The Froogle prototype I had been trying out found products for sale on the web and ranked them according to "relevance," which didn't mean much when you had thirty identical waffle irons all offered at the same price. We did have "objectivity." Our partner Yahoo charged most merchants to be included in their product search, and Yahoo's search results sent users to Yahoo stores instead of directly to the merchants' sites. Yahoo had an editorial team making decisions, while we used a completely automated, and thus "purer," system, unaffected by paid relationships with merchants.
That was pretty much it.
There was no way to buy anything on Froogle without leaving the site. There were no product reviews. There were no merchant ratings. You couldn't sort by store, by brand, or by price. There was no way to do anything other than click on a link and go somewhere else. It was a search for finding products—a product search. That, I thought, is what we should call it: "Google product search." Calling it "Froogle" gave the impression that it was a comprehensive, full-fledged service, not a feature. People would bring to their first experience with Froogle all the expectations we had trained them to have for new Google services. They would expect "the Google of commerce." Instead, they would get—product search.
I went to Salar and the UI team to be sure they were aligned with my thinking. They were. Salar didn't like the name because the "frugal/Froogle" pun wouldn't translate internationally. Some English speakers might not get it either. Now I had to convince the people who could stop the runaway train before it got to the end of the line. I would argue my case at the Froogle GPS.
Each major product now had a forum dedicated to it. These get-togethers were dubbed "Google Product Strategy" (GPS) meetings and were attended by executives who could alter the launch timing, correct off-target plans, or completely change the features and purpose of the product in mid-development. Larry, Sergey, and Eric were there, along with Jonathan, Salar, Susan, and Marissa.
When my turn to speak came, I made my case to what I perceived as a hostile jury. I acknowledged the advantages of a memorable name for a product that was fully baked, but pointed out that our product search had barely gone into the oven. I laid out, logically and concisely, all the issues that made "Froogle" a poor choice, and I closed by suggesting that we should hold the name in reserve to apply when "Google product search" truly deserved its own brand. Better to underpromise now, I suggested, and overdeliver. I stopped talking and sat back, confident that Clarence Darrow could not have delivered a more cogent brief.
Sergey looked around the table. "I like, 'Froogle,'" he said. "It's kind of funky and different. I think it's cute."
That wasn't the end of it. Eric charged Salar, Susan, and me with presenting an alternative to "Froogle" at the next GPS. We agreed on "Google product search," presented it, defended it, and were overruled.
That was the end of it. Of that part at least. But then the question of the tagline arose.
None of our other Google services had a tagline—a marketing slogan intended to get people to use a product. All our services had straightforward descriptive text on their homepages, explaining
what they actually did. Text like "The most comprehensive image search on the web," or "Search and browse 4,000 continuously updated news sources." Perhaps because Froogle was a product dealing with commerce, there was suddenly a yen for a real marketing tagline.
The board of directors had saved the marketing department the trouble of developing one. "The board really likes, 'All the world's products in one place,'" Eric announced at the November Froogle GPS. They wanted us to plaster it everywhere on the site. A great tagline, but obviously and provably false. I set about changing everyone's minds.
Fortunately, Marissa and I were in agreement that the board's wording promised too much. Unfortunately, we disagreed on whether the replacement should emphasize relevance (Marissa) or objectivity (me). We batted emails back and forth like Pong professionals, each making the case for our own word. That debate dragged on for weeks, until Larry said "objectivity" was out. I think it may have cut too close to the bone for Yahoo, which was still a major partner.
I countered with the line "Find products for sale from across the web." It was a purely descriptive phrase devoid of any marketing spin, and it avoided insulting our partners. Five days before the scheduled launch, no one had objected to it. Pearl informed me my line would be the one on the site because it was the least controversial. I had lost the "Froogle" war but won the tagline battle. Small consolation, but I savored it.
The next day, the executive staff changed the Froogle homepage line back to "All the world's products in one place." The word came down that Larry and our board member John Doerr both liked the wording. No—they loved it. My teaspoonful of victory now tasted overwhelmingly of ashes.
On December 11, 2002, Froogle launched with little fanfare. We pushed it out the door quietly so as not to overly alarm Yahoo or AOL about our entry into an area they might view as competitive. But a new product from Google could no longer slip into the mainstream without making a splash. Froogle quickly became the center of a global media storm. Google was challenging the major players in e-commerce with a new shopping site. We were compared to Yahoo, to AOL, to Amazon, though clearly we offered few of the features of a full commerce site. Traffic to Froogle peaked high, then tapered off, and then, after the Christmas shopping season, plummeted sixty-five percent.
Also plummeting was enthusiasm for our tagline. Cindy heard feedback from her contacts in the press that our braggadocio was an unwelcome departure from our usual understated approach. "I don't like the tagline," one reporter told her. "I think Google as a search service never made any grand or best-in-the-world-type claims. The effect of this extreme form of, 'underpromise, overdeliver' philosophy has been to make me feel certain that Google is supremely well conceived and fully worthy of every bit of trust that users place in it." Our new tagline violated that principle, and did so for a product that "was not equally well conceived nor equally worthy of users' trust."
Ouch. When you start getting marketing advice from journalists, something is seriously out of whack. Cindy agreed and even admitted regret for not having supported my recommendation more forcefully. The executive staff conceded that "All the world's products" might have overreached. Pearl asked me to prepare another slide explaining why it was a bad tagline. To all the reasons I had listed previously, I added, "It's blatantly and provably untrue." At the January 2003 GPS meeting, the executive staff agreed to switch to the line I had recommended. Eric even raised the possibility of killing the Froogle name and integrating the service directly into Google.com results.*
These developments left me with an unaccustomed feeling. I had been right in an argument with Larry and Sergey and Eric. Sometimes you just get lucky. It did embolden me, though. My instincts for our brand had been correct. Perhaps this would open a door and give marketing more credibility and access to the product-development process earlier in the pipeline. That way we could avoid last-minute scrambles and apply the same intelligence to branding as we did to the product's features. Perhaps the tension between product management and my consumer-marketing group would diminish.
I looked forward to exploring areas of interdepartmental cooperation in 2003, but I wouldn't get the chance for a while. Cindy had asked me to go to Tokyo. We had won Yahoo Japan's search business in November, and we needed to understand more about promoting our product in that market. I'd be operating out of our new office in the Shibuya neighborhood and would interview some job candidates, consult with ad agency Dentsu, and meet with a marketing group that had done some work for us. All very straightforward.
I let Cindy know I could probably squeeze the trip in, though it would be a hardship for Kristen, home with our three kids before the holidays. Japan was familiar turf for me: I'd been a Rotary scholar in Nagoya for a year after college. But the idea of taking my first international business trip secretly thrilled me. At forty-four, I was experiencing the same excitement I had felt the first day of high school. I had graduated to a new status because my company valued me enough to send me five thousand miles away.
Imagine, then, my elation when a couple weeks after my return from Japan, Cindy asked me to leave again. This time it was to help Sergey and our international PR team open a new office in Milan. We hosted a press conference and party at a trendy nightclub. I ate a dozen different cheeses at a single meal and discovered that wearing a nice suit from Macy's put me three fashion steps behind the barista serving me cappuccino. And cappuccino didn't look at all like what I got at Starbucks, but tasted like foamy caffeinated ambrosia. I cut the epaulets off my London Fog overcoat with a razor because no one in Italy wore epaulets, and I cursed my slick-soled loafers because they gave me no purchase on the rain-soaked marble streets. I carried deflated exercise balls around half the city looking for a place with an air pump to fill them for our coming-out party. It was all fantastic. By the time I got home I had convinced myself I should focus all my attention on building our international brand and keep a packed suitcase under my desk for quick getaways.
"Maybe you could take me next time," Kristen suggested, ironing my shirts as I regaled her with tales of couture and cannoli.
"Oh," I said unthinkingly as she maneuvered the heavy hot iron around a collar, "I was in meetings all day. What would you do on your own in Milan? You'd just be bored."
It's a testament to my wife's generous character that I'm still alive to tell that tale.
I would go to Japan again for Google, and to China, but there was too much going on in Mountain View to make constant globe-hopping feasible. I had branding guidelines to work out for new partners and language to draft for new products and site tours and newsletters. And I wanted to spend the credibility capital I had earned from Froogle. I decided to invest some of it to promote my ideas about the consumer brand we were building and how it should evolve.
Chapter 24
Don't Let Marketing Drive
NO, DAD," I told my father as I watched pop-up ads spread across his screen, obscuring Google's homepage. "Google's not doing that. You've downloaded something you shouldn't have." I spent the next two hours of my vacation cleaning parasite programs off his computer.
Scumware was back. The malicious software that launched a thousand pop-up ads had never really gone away, but as 2003 began Googlers became increasingly alarmed by the proliferation of new mutant forms across the Internet. Matt Cutts, who dealt with the dark arts of the web every day in his battles against porn and spam, had reached a boiling point. On a visit to Omaha, Matt had spent an entire day cleaning scumware off his mother-in-law's PC. When he got back, his own computer had been infected. Worst of all, the company distributing the scumware afflicting him turned out to be a partner in Google's new syndicated-ads network. We were sending them ads to show on their website and then paying them every time someone clicked on one. We were bankrolling their scummy behavior. Matt and I were not the only ones enraged.
"I'd love to file a lawsuit and have a head on a pike," Matt recalls Larry saying about scumware creators and distributors. Matt's proposed s
olution was to post a screed on Google.com like the one we had launched previously about pop-up ads, but with a specific focus on identifying and removing scumware programs. I was a hundred percent for it, but this time, others had concerns. First, it would be hard to be righteous when we were doing business with a scumware site. We'd have to terminate that relationship before going any further. Second, several engineers were reluctant to launch an arms race against an invisible enemy while we were a sitting target.
Marissa proposed a compromise. We would be launching a pop-up blocker for the Google toolbar in a month or two. It would stop pop-ups from appearing, but not remove the programs that launched them. Could we fold Matt's language about scumware into the page talking about that new feature? She argued that simply taking a stand against scumware without context might seem self-serving, that people would think we just didn't want to lose revenue from users the programs hijacked to other sites.
I didn't want to compromise. Scumware was not a revenue issue, it was a privacy issue. I had personally experienced the invasive nature of a parasite program, and seen my dad's frustration as it crippled his computer. That infuriated me and perhaps clouded my judgment. I assured Matt I was prepared to wield a flaming sword and pursue those responsible to the ends of the earth. Or at the least, to make a positive assertion that Google was not behind the nasty behavior that irritated affected users. Google was righteous. "Google," I wanted the world to know, "would never screw its users."
Matt said he liked the idea of Google as a consumer advocate, fighting on behalf of users even on issues not directly affecting us. That encouraged me. The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that "consumer advocate" should be the next phase of Google's brand evolution. We would leave the sea of search and step onto the dry land of a new, more wondrous world in which we would become not just the source of information but the ally and protector of users who were searching for answers. In addition to being "fast, accurate, and easy to use," we would be a trusted friend.
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Page 39
