I had an interesting discussion with a guy at work today, another web geek like me who watched a lot that was great and good on the web die. We pondered the eternal question: "How is it that dumbass marketing people are allowed to kill or ruin so many good sites?"
The question is eternal because it isn't just about the dumbass marketing people altogether, it is about the basic assumptions of the field. I mean, if it weren't, the pattern wouldn't be so widely replicable. It is a clear pattern. Create a visionary web site, a terrific concept, an imaginative product, a thriving community, a quirky sense of humor, and as soon as you are successful, VC or some other consultant will usher some dumbass marketing person into the room to kill the cash cow.
First, why would people allow such a thing? Second, why wouldn't they correct it after the damage was done? I have no easy answers. Like with the 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, we could dump a pile of these idiots down there and it would be a good start.
Which is why Google is so refreshing, and why this cautionary tale is worth reading. Especially by anyone who would sell their soul to VC instead of building their vision in a garage. All I can say is, "go for the garage, go for the garage," as nothing overly shaped by these marketing idiots who only understand passive to the point of activating the gag reflex "push" mass media will ever fly for long in the world of interactivity. The web represents a foundational overthrow of the basic assumptions of marketing, and thank god it does.
Chris
How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows[...]
This is what it's like inside Google. It is a joint founded by geeks and run by geeks. It is a collection of 650 really smart people who are almost frighteningly single-minded. "These are people who think they are creating something that's the best in the world," says Peter Norvig, a Google engineering director. "And that product is changing people's lives."
Geeks are different from the rest of us, so it's no surprise that they've created a different sort of company. Google is, in fact, their dream house. It also happens to be among the best-run companies in the technology sector. At a moment when much of business has resigned itself to the pursuit of sameness and safety, Google proposes an almost joyous antidote to mediocrity, a model for smart innovation in challenging times.
Google's tale is a familiar one: Two Stanford doctoral students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, developed a set of algorithms that in 1998 sparked a holy-shit leap in Web-search performance. Basically, they turned search into a popularity contest. In addition to gauging a phrase's appearance on a Web page, as other engines did, it assessed relevance by counting the number and importance of other pages that linked to that page.
Since then, newer search products such as Teoma and Fast have essentially matched Google's advance. But Google remains the undisputed search heavyweight. Google says it processes more than 150 million searches a day -- and the true number is probably much higher than that. Google's revenue model is notoriously tough to deconstruct: Analysts guess that its revenue last year was anywhere from $60 million to $300 million. But they also guess that Google made quite a bit of money.
[...]
For now, though, most of the cars in the lot outside Google's modest offices in a Mountain View, California office park are beat-up Volvos and Subarus, not Porsches. And while Googlers may relish their shot at impossible wealth, they appear driven more by the quest for impossible perfection. They want to build something that searches every bit of information on the Web. More important, they want to deliver exactly what the user is looking for, every time. They know that this won't ever happen, and yet they keep at it. They also pursue a seemingly gratuitous quest for speed: Four years ago, the average search took approximately 3 seconds. Now it's down to about 0.2 seconds. And since 0.2 is more than zero, it's not quite fast enough.
[...]
But what is most striking about Google is its internal consistency. It is a beautifully considered machine, each piece seemingly true to all the rest. The appearance of advertising on a page, for example, follows the same rules that dictate search results or even new-product innovation. Those rules are simple, governed by supply, demand, and democracy -- which is more or less the logic of the Internet too.
[...]
Google doesn't market itself in the traditional sense. Instead, it observes, and it listens. It obsesses over search-traffic figures, and it reads its email. In fact, 10 full-time employees do nothing but read emails from users, distributing them to the appropriate colleagues or responding to them themselves. "Nearly everyone has access to user feedback," says Monika Henzinger, Google's director of research. "We all know what the problem areas are, where users are complaining."
The upshot is that Google enjoys a unique understanding of its users -- and a unique loyalty. It has managed a remarkable feat: appealing to tech-savvy Web addicts without alienating neophytes who type in "amazon.com" to find . . . Amazon.com. ( Yes, people really do that. Google doesn't know why. )
"Google knows how to make geeks feel good about being geeks," says Cory Doctorow, prominent geek, blogger, and technology propagandist. Google has done that from the beginning, when Brin and Page basically laid open their stunning new technology in a 1998 conference paper. They invited in the geeks in and made them feel as if they were in on something special.
But they didn't forget to make everyone else feel special too. They still do, by focusing relentlessly on the quality of the experience. Make it easy. Make it fast. Make it work. And attack everything that gets in the way of perfection.
[...]
Google loosed Smackdown and other eccentric Web novelties when it released a developer's kit last spring that lets anyone integrate Google's search engine into their own application. The download is simple, and the license is free for the taking.
Here's the scary bit: Basically, those developers can do whatever they want . The only control that Google exerts is a cap of 1,000 queries per day per license to guard against an onslaught that might bring down its servers. In most cases, Minar and his colleagues have no idea how people use the code. "It's kind of frustrating," he concedes. "We would love to see what they're doing."
Most companies would sooner let temps into the executive washroom than let customers -- much less customers who can hack -- anywhere near their core intellectual property. Google, though, grasps the power of an engaged community. The developer's kit is a classic Trojan-horse strategy, putting Google's engine in places that the company might not have imagined. More important, Bausch says, opening up the technology kimono "turns the world into Google's development team."
[...]
Google spends more time on hiring than on anything else. It knows this because, like any bunch of obsessive engineers, it keeps track. It says that it gets 1,500 resumes a day from wanna-be Googlers. Between screening, interviewing, and assessing, it invested 87 Google people-hours in each of the 300 or so people that it hired in 2002.
Google hires two sorts of engineers, both aimed at encouraging the art of fast failure. First, it looks for young risk takers. "We look for smart," says Wayne Rosing, who heads Google's engineering ranks. "Smart as in, do they do something weird outside of work, something off the beaten path? That translates into people who have no fear of trying difficult projects and going outside the bounds of what they know."
But Google also hires stars, PhDs from top computer-science programs and research labs. "It has continually managed to hire 90% of the best search-engine people in the world," says Brian Davison, a Lehigh University assistant professor and a top search expert himself. The PhDs are Google's id. They are the people who know enough to shoot holes in ideas before they go too far -- to make the failures happen faster.
[...]
Google has no strategic-planning department. CEO Eric Schmidt hasn't decreed which technologies his engineers should dabble in or which products they must deliver. Innovation at Google is as democratic as the search technology itself. The more popular an idea, the more traction it wins, and the better its chances.
[...]
Advertisers don't just pay a set rate, or even a cost per thousand viewers. They bid on the search term. The more an advertiser is willing to pay, the higher its ad will be positioned. But if the ad doesn't get clicks, its rank will decline over time, regardless of how much has been bid. If an ad is persistently irrelevant, Google will remove it: It's not working for the advertiser, it's not serving users, and it's taking up server capacity.
This is how it is at Google. Google News attracted eyeballs among Bharat's employees, so it made the leap to the public domain. If enough users like it, it will have real power with advertisers. And traffic for advertisers will beget even more traffic for advertisers.
So yes, Mayer has a revenue strategy. She's had one since January 2002, before the first version of News went public. She won't say what it is, but if News can build enough traffic, Google almost surely will seek advertising. It will probably resell the service to portals and other commercial sites, just as it does with its core Web search. ( Every time you see the Google logo on a corporate site, the company is likely paying at least $25,000 a year for a Google server. ) "But we're not in a hurry," Mayer says. "We're focused on making News a great experience. Until we figure out whether the product has traction, there's no rush to execute the revenue plan."
Could it be any simpler? Build great products, and see if people use them. If they do, then you have created value. And if you've truly done that, then you have a business. Says Mayer: "Our motto here is, There's no such thing as success-failure on the Net." In other words, if users win, then Google wins. Long live democracy.
Comments