Google

By: Chuck SalterThu Feb 14, 2008 at 6:35 PM

Andy Rubin | photo by Russ Quackenbush

The faces and voices of the world's most innovative company.

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Larry Brilliant | photo by Russ Quackenbush

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Marissa Mayer | photo by Russ Quackenbush

Matt Glotzbach

Product Management Director For Google Enterprise

"What do you normally do when you start a new job? You waste time filling out paperwork. My first morning at Google, I put my name and address on one form online, and it went everywhere it needed to go electronically. That's how this place works.

I went to a staff meeting that afternoon and got assigned to figure out how Google could launch Enterprise [applications for corporations] in Europe. I was told to come back with the answer at the end of the week. It was like, 'Hey, New Guy, you don't know anything about our business yet, and you don't have any international experience, but here are some people who can help you. Go figure it out.' We launched in Europe a few months later."

Marissa Mayer

Vp Of Search Products And User Experience

"After September 11, one of our researchers, Krishna Bharat, would go to 10 or 15 news sites each day looking for information about the case. And he thought, Why don't I write a program to do this? So Krishna, who's an expert in artificial intelligence, used a Web crawler to cluster articles. He later emailed it around the company. My office mate and I got it, and we were like, 'This isn't just a cool little tool for Krishna. We could add more sources and build this into a great product.'

That's how Google News came about. Krishna did not intend to build a product, but he accidentally gave us the idea for one. We let engineers spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust that they'll build interesting things.

There are two different types of programmers. Some like to code for months or even years, and hope they will have built the perfect product. That's castle building. Apple is great at it. Others prefer to have something working at the end of the day, something to refine and improve the next day. That's what we do. The hardest part about indoctrinating people into our culture is when engineers show me a prototype and I'm like, 'Great, let's go!' They'll say, 'Oh, no, it's not ready.' I tell them, 'The Googly thing is to launch it early on Google Labs and then to iterate, learning what the market wants--and making it great.'

Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn't matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data."

T.V. Raman (with Hubbell)

Research Scientist In Accessibility

"A lot of people in engineering at Google would be in research at other companies--that's where all the PhDs usually are. This makes it difficult for those researchers to take an idea the whole way through the development process: Technology transfer becomes a big problem. But research isn't off in a corner here. It's not an ivory-tower goal. Where does innovation happen at Google? It happens everywhere, because everybody does research."

Irene Au

Director Of User Experience

"In a few years, most Internet users around the world will be coming off of non-PC devices. So we did ethnographic research. We followed people around for a day or so and watched how they used technology. Then we littered the walls with stories and observations on Post-it Notes. If you look at India and China, Internet use is completely different. People in Asian countries are less inclined to search because it's hard to type the character set. So we developed Google Suggest; it predicts what you're searching for so you don't have to type the whole thing. Those user stories went into a database that we shared with other teams. That's how we cross the silos."

Jessica Ewing

Senior Product Manager for Igoogle

"It was clear to Google that there were two groups: people who loved the site's clean, classic look and people who wanted tons of information there--email, news, local weather. IGoogle [a customized Google home page] started out with me and three engineers. I was 22, and I thought, This is awesome. Six weeks later, we launched the first version in May. The happiness metrics were good, there was healthy growth, and by September, we had a link on Google.com.

When the Google Maps team released Street View [featuring 360-degree photos], we thought, That is the coolest thing ever. We try to out-innovate each other. We asked, 'How do we take iGoogle to the next level?' Rather than using brute force to create everything, we built the tools and infrastructure to leverage the outside developer community. We couldn't believe the stuff that people came up with. There was one high-school kid who developed the periodic table in a gadget [Google's version of a widget]. We'd never have thought of that.

Then we thought, How can we personalize the home page better? My brother had just had his first kid. I created a gadget that updates a picture of my nephew Jack so you can watch him as he grows. We realized there's no reason only developers should be able to create content. Our next release was called Gadget Maker. Now anybody can create a gadget like I did and send it to friends and make it public."

From Issue 123 | March 2008

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Recent Comments | 55 Total

February 20, 2008 at 5:01pm by Richard Lipscombe

It is true Googlers tell great stories even though they are repetitive - but then they do have great achievements to talk about and so this thing is a feel good advertisement for Google. Nevertheless there is a real issue lurking for the future of innovation at Google - it is simply that the Googleplex has become a limiting factor for innovation. The C21st is all about networked or distributed models for business and their innovators. Let us hope therefore that Google projects in India, China, New York, Ireland, etc come to rapidly outpace and outstrip the innovations homegrown in Mountain View. By 2012 my innovation for Google would be to have the Googleplex concentrating on running and innovating passive revenue models while the engineering and product development is done in clusters offshore or out of the State of California...