Long time no blog

Can you believe it's been over six months since the last post on Xooglers? My, how the time flies.

I'm going to shamelessly usurp Doug's soap box to make a plug for free speech. Reddit today led me to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRPVsamLaKk

(Since Google acquired YouTube I figure that makes this fair game for Xooglers.)

This video is by a fellow named Nick Gisburne. His account was deleted for posting another video that was nothing but a slide show of quotations from the Quran. (That video has since been reposted by at least a dozen other people so it's easy to find.)

This really bothers me for four reasons. First, to deem quotations from a holy text to be "inappropriate content" is outrageous on its face. Second, Gisburne was given no warning. Third, YouTube didn't just delete the video in question, they deleted Gisburne's entire account. And fourth, this makes a mockery of Google's "don't be evil" slogan. There can be no possible reason for this action other than caving to intimidation, and sanctimonious cowardice in the face of oppression is a particularly pernicious breed of evil.

If you share my outrage I urge you to contact YouTube and let them know how you feel.

This word just in…

This week googling officially became a verb. The 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary now includes “googling” (lower case g). Actually the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) beat them to the punch a month ago by listing Google (upper case g) in their authoritative lexicon of the English language. It’s about time. People have been using Google as a verb for years, despite protestations by the company (many of which I authored myself) about the genericization of the trademarked name.

Having your brand name used as a generic term, is of course, a mixed blessing for a company. On the one hand, it’s great to have your name become the common shorthand for an entire category. It implies acceptance that your product is the standard by which all others in the category are judged and it’s great word-of-mouth for building awareness and trial.

On the other hand, you want to protect your trademark and it’s difficult to do that if overuse dilutes its connection to your product. If Google becomes synonymous with “searching the internet” without a connection to the specific service offered by Google Inc. at www.google.com, then anyone can offer a way to “google for information.” Say, for example, Microsoft. They could offer an MSN google box if Google’s trademark on the name were to be revoked through genericide.

And so, companies like Google are forced to write letters to those who misuse their trademark as a verb (verbs cannot be trademarked). If they don’t, the US Patent and Trademark Office may decide that the company is no longer interested in maintaining ownership of its trademarked term.

The whole process is silly and goes against the dynamic nature of language and is about as effective as standing in a rising river and yelling at the rain to stop falling. Everyone knows people will use words the way they want to. That’s how languages avoid dying. As an English major and frequent abuser of grammar as an advertising copywriter, I always felt hypocritical playing enforcer, but the law was pretty clear. So letters were sent when we saw our trademark being incorrectly applied.

We’d work with TV shows that wanted to include references to Google and request that they not use it as a verb (they usually ignored us). We’d ask reporters not to promote incorrect usage and we’d keep an eye on the most important of all agents in the battle for trademark protection: lexicographers.

Once an editor defines a word in a dictionary, it carries a lot of weight in the courts as they decide whether a word is still a trademark or has become a more general term. So, we tried to forestall the official definition of Google as something other than our proprietary service.

In early 2003, the website Wordspy included Google as a neologism, without specifically tying it to Google Technology Inc (the formal name of the company at that time). So, our legal department sent them a letter. The note was a typically polite, but direct, request that Wordspy cease and desist their use of Google in an improper fashion. It didn’t threaten legal action, but simply asked that Wordspy, “help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the trademark status of Google.”

When the publisher of Wordspy posted the letter on his site, some people inside and outside of the Googleplex got upset about Google having turned into a heavy-handed monopolistic oppressor of the weak and downtrodden. This happened with disturbing regularity. Apparently a certain percentage of any set group of people looks for signs that companies with sterling reputations are actually fronting for Satan. And of course, with Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto hanging on its back like a “kick me” sign, the company got cut very little slack.

The internal controversy led to seminars on what constituted a trademark and discussion about whether we violated our own rules by offering onesies for infants that said "I Google" and by signing our customer service emails with "Keep on Googlin'."

Slashdot picked up the Wordspy story, which meant it quickly spread through the geek community. To be fair, most of the comments on the original post accurately reflected the nature of Google’s predicament. Still, the hate mail began pouring in and we scrambled to smooth our users’ ruffled feathers.

Just as that furor was calming down, we heard a rumor that the OED was going to include Google in their next edition. Given their prominence, we couldn’t afford to sit back and hope for the best. I worked with Rose in legal to write a letter that took on more of an advisory than adversarial tone. It turned out to be a false alarm as Google had not yet attained the level of awareness it has today and the editors of the OED were not ready to acknowledge it formally. We did receive assurances that the OED staff understood the nature of trademarks and were sensitive to the issues involved in defining a trademark term.

We began sending letters to other dictionaries as well and received similar replies. We also took the pre-emptive step of running ads in journalism publications (reporters are another key decider of word usage) that read as follows:

Searching for the right word?

Please use Google to find it, but not to describe what you did.

With constant generic use, trademarks can lose their special status and their proper name capitalization. It’s happened to once-trademarked products including yo-yo, trampoline, and nylon. Trademark lawyers call it “genericide.” We call it avoidable.

Google™ is a trademark identifying Google Inc.’s search technology and services. We know Google is fun to say, and of course it’s great fun to use. And though we’re flattered that people like our name, it’s also our company’s chief commercial asset. We want to ensure that people use it in a way that preserves its meaning and integrity.

Google should never be used as a noun or a verb, or to mean “searching” in a non-specific, general sense. Here are some examples of appropriate and inappropriate uses of Google's trademark:

Appropriate
I used Google to check out that guy I met at the party.
Inappropriate
I googled that hottie.

Appropriate
We were looking for new MP3s with Google.
Inappropriate
We were googling ‘MP3s.’

Appropriate
He ego-surfs on Google to see if he's listed in the results.
Inappropriate
He googles himself..

Appropriate
They use Google to research the latest on lemurs.
Inappropriate
They google ‘lemurs.’

The distinction may be subtle, but it's a very important one to make. The choice of the right word often is. We're happy to answer any questions you may have about the proper use of the Google name. Write to us at legal@google.com.

We'll help you find just the words your searching for.

The ad was intentionally tongue-in- cheek and, at least in my mind, a tacit admission that it's much more fun to use Google as a verb than to use it properly. I mean, who wouldn't rather say, "I googled that hottie" than the legally-mandated, but dull-as-an-old-brogan alternative?

Though our efforts were occasionally disparaged by those who would prefer Google retain it’s warm fuzzy “just regular folks, no lawyers here” persona, the definitions of Google just published both properly cite the connection of “googling” to the Google search engine. I’m not an attorney, but as a brand manager, I wouldn’t be too upset about having authoritative printed support for the notion that Googling is correctly used only when tied directly to the company’s trademarked service.

Want to learn more about trademark protection? It's okay. Go ahead. Google it.

Brilliant! Love it! Now, could you change it all around?

The script Scott sent us for the Dilbert Google doodle seemed to pick up nicely on Sergey’s suggestion.

In the first panel, the pointy-haired boss (PHB) sits next to the regular Google logo and says to his staff, "We need a new logo by Friday. Any ideas?"



The next day, the “G" and "O” at the front of the logo are screened back so that they appear much paler than the last four letters. Dilbert says, "We could drop the first two letters."
 The PHB answers, "That's a no go idea."

On day three, the last three letters are faded back and Dilbert says, "We could shorten the logo to three letters."
 The Boss says, "No, Goo isn't sticky."


Those three panels were easily approved and became part of the final doodle published on the site. What didn’t make the cut were the fourth panel, in which Wally says, "The logo needs more sex appeal. I'll show you..."

 and the fifth panel, featuring Wally standing in front of the "OO" part of the logo as if the O’s are, as Scott put it, “his gigantic man-breasts
,” while Dilbert says, "I find this disturbing."

There is something inherently amusing in the notion of man-breasts. As someone whose own sense of humor runs to Mel Brooks and Dave Barry, I wasn’t terribly offended by the concept, but I suspected others would be. I was right.

After sending it around to other Googlers, questions were raised about how it would play internationally, the use of the word “sex,” and the appearance of breasts (male or female) on our signature page. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, none of those objections came from Sergey, who found the concept pretty funny and opined that we shouldn’t be afraid to take a few risks. The irony of acting like one of the clueless companies Dilbert lampoons was not lost on him.

I’d like to say that I fought for the concept and damned the shortsighted, small-minded philistines who couldn’t see the greatness inherent in Scott’s original idea. I’d like to say that, but then I would be lying. Frankly, I was relieved that I wasn’t the only one nervous about where Scott was taking us. I would find it amusing to see this in his strip, but not on our branded homepage, which we were showing to millions of people around the globe. They hadn’t come to Google expecting to see slightly risqué humor. They’d come to find information.

My sensitivity to the subjectiveness of humor wasn't always as finely attuned. On more than one occasion in my career, what I had thought was funny had turned out to be less than amusing to others.

I made fun of bagpiping neighbors in a radio spot for the Mercury News that brought the wrath of a lunatic Celtic rights advocate raining down upon me.

I wrote a newspaper ad headline for KQED FM that said “Ed Meese is history” during the station’s broadcast of live coverage of the Senate Iran Contra hearings. The station president didn’t buy my argument that it referred to the fact that Meese’s testimony had ended the day before and we were now covering the next witness. He seemed pretty peeved when I kept trying to persuade him to run it anyway.

And while at an ad agency, I pissed off the descendants of California’s most famous gold miner with an ad for a business school claiming that “When John Sutter found gold, he lost a fortune. He could have used an MBA from USF.”

The editor of the San Francisco Chronicle sent a personal complaint to my boss at the Mercury News during a newspaper war for subscribers after the close of a smaller local paper. He felt my flyer pointing out that there were only two Peninsula-related stories in their paper compared to the Merc’s two dozen was hitting below the belt. He seemed particularly ticked over the line, “Yesterday the Chronicle gave you two bits for your 35 cents.”

And then there was the time I wanted to promote the depth of news stories in the Mercury News online archive. I browsed hundreds of stories and came up with a piece reviewing the food at local company cafeterias, including Silicon Graphics. Turns out they had served rabbit once, so I stuck a drawing of a bunny in an ad that made reference to the menu. The next morning, PETA started picketing SGI’s headquarters. After a series of snafus in the newspaper’s composing room led to the ad running twice more after I had promised the publisher it wouldn’t, I got to write a personal letter of apology to SGI’s CEO and barely held onto my job. (Ironically, I was to eat many meals in that very cafeteria when Google took over SGI's headquarters).

So, let’s say I wasn’t all that anxious to step out on the bleeding edge of comedy again.

The upshot was that I had to go back to Scott and ask him to remove the man-breasts. He wasn’t all that happy about it, but consummate professional that he is, he was back within the hour with a modified version. In this one, Dogbert says, "The logo needs more sex appeal. I'll show you..."

 The next day, Dogbert peers through the "OO" part of the logo as if they’re his glasses.

 Dilbert says, "I find this disturbing."


The “sex” set off alarm bells again for one senior manager, which led Sergey to start making noises about going back to the original idea. I volunteered to go back to Scott yet again and ask for a third version. I really didn’t want to do it, because it’s never fun to tell a creative person working for free that their idea just isn’t good enough. (I’d done that at a previous job when a world-renowned ad agency wrote some pro-bono ads for me that were way out of my comfort zone).

I walked a very fine line with Scott. I told him how funny the first idea was and that we were sorry that it wasn’t appropriate for our audience. I told him the second idea was fine, but not as funny as the first, which was our fault for bringing a corporate mentality to the project. I gently asked if he’d be willing to go to phase three. He said he’d sleep on it. In the morning, he sent us the version that actually ran. He also asked that he be allowed to run the rejected ideas on his website, which was fine with me, though I’m not sure he actually posted more than a description of the man-breast idea.

Of course, everyone loved the new idea and I was once again the hero, not the goat. Well, to everyone except my boss, who didn’t think it was all that funny, even in it’s third version. And then we posted the first day’s strip. The Googlers-misc mailing list began humming like Zappa’s dynamo.

As mentioned earlier, Googlers-misc was the place for anyone in the company to share their thoughts on any activity in which the company was engaged. There had already been an active thread proposing a homepage tribute to a soon-to-be-released science fiction movie popular with geeks of all ages when Dilbert put in his first appearance. That thread quickly became focused on the dark side of our Dilbert logo and the great disturbance it was creating among our users. Or at least, the users who happened to have friends working at Google.

The concerns varied from the fear that we were seriously planning to change our logo forever to the sense that we had sold out the homepage to promote a blatantly commercial enterprise. And the avatar of that latter evil, the cool hard ceramic proof point of that, was, yes, you guessed it: the mug.

I won’t bore you with the details of the disdain Googlers heaped upon the Google-Dilbert mug and their concerns about the message it was sending to our loyal users, but suffice it to say that it was heartfelt, voluminous and incapable of being ignored. Google was still a relatively small company at this point and any time more than three Googlers were unhappy about something, it required a response.

CNET made things worse by running a story that included the line, “Part of the fun in business is making money, of course: 
Google plans to sell T-shirts with the Dilbert logo, as well as the coffee
 mugs." The t-shirt reference was untrue and was eventually corrected, but the damage was done. It cast the whole initiative as a profit-driven grab for cash.

So I went to Sergey with the suggestion supported by many staffers that we give the proceeds for the mug sale to charity, which we would make clear on the site. He agreed and suggested something related to cancer research. And that’s why I placed a call to the American Cancer Society to let them know we’d be sending them a check for more than $11,000.

As for the mugs, they’re no longer available since it was to be a limited time offer. I have one, as do 400 other Googlers to whom we gave them during TGIF. I took that to mean that at least some Googlers didn’t object to seeing Dilbert adorning our logo.

In the aftermath, we were approached by many artists, cartoonists and brand managers, who felt the door was now opened to promoting their products on what was becoming one of the web’s most popular homepages. We turned them all down, because we now had empirical evidence that any commercialization or even perceived commercialization of the homepage logo would be detrimental to the brand we were building.

That’s why you’re not likely to see another cartoonist logo on Google. And while I think we ended on good terms with Scott, I wouldn’t blame him for wanting to poke a little fun at Google’s brain trust.

What did I take away from this whole experience? Four things:

Brand managers are not always the people closest to the true nature of the brand, nor the best able to see what might be construed as damaging to its integrity.

Having free-flowing, unregulated communication within a company can be distracting, annoying and damaging to one’s ego, but it lets you know pretty quickly when you’ve stepped across a line you shouldn’t have crossed.

Expect that there will be unexpected ramifications from even the most innocuous seeming initiatives. That shouldn’t stop you from moving ahead, but you should be ready to respond to the weirdness and be flexible about the ways in which you do it.

Cartoons should never be written by a committee.

A postscript: I watched Google launch its recent Da Vinci Code puzzle promotion with interest. I think it was handled well and avoided the dreaded Dilbert effect by making the promotion opt-in and tying it to a specific Google service (homepage personalization). The challenge also fit Google’s branding strategy of promoting puzzle solving and smart thinking, which is tied to both the brand value and Google’s recruitment efforts (more on that another time). They didn’t change the homepage logo and they didn’t sell mugs.

I’d be surprised if they didn’t get some mail about tying to a controversial story that’s banned in some parts of the world, but that’s one of those eggs you have to break if you’re going to make an omelet. With millions of users, someone’s always going to be pissed off about something.

I hope there was a Googlers-misc thread about whether the promotion marked a sellout to corporate interests and the death knell of the old Google, but that kind of debate is probably a relic of Google’s past. Still, an unmoderated discussion about core-values among 6,000 plus bright, opinionated, articulate individuals would likely be highly entertaining, as long as you’re not Google’s new brand and entertainment manager Dylan Casey.

Dylan, I feel your pain.

There's no story, yet the plot thickens

When last I posted, Scott Adams had just agreed to work with us on Dilbertifying Google’s home page logo. It turns out that Scott had spoken with a reporter about search engines a couple of days prior to our request and the journalist had recommended he try Google. Scott did a few searches and liked what he found. Serendipitously, we reached him when he was still basking in the glow of his conversion experience.

I don’t remember the exact wording of my original email request to Scott, but I do recall trying to walk a very fine line between fawning and groveling. Being a Dilbert fan, I knew he’d be an excellent choice for our first cartoonist logo, though I wasn’t so smitten that I didn’t reserve (politely), editorial control over what would appear on Google’s pages. We weren’t willing to pay a licensing fee, but we were willing to shower him with branded Google merchandise. (Scott was later quoted in the press release we issued as saying, "This partnership exceeded my wildest dreams… I hoped I would get a free Google shirt, and I got three of them plus a mug.")

One of Scott’s many fine qualities is that he answers his email promptly. I heard back from him the day after I sent my note and he seemed open to the idea of creating a custom logo for us, even without compensation. Sergey gave it an enthusiastic green light and Scott put me in touch with his publishing syndicate to work out the details.

I’ve yet to meet an artist or writer who enjoys having their creativity corralled to meet the needs of a corporate entity, so I wanted to give Scott full rein within some broad guidelines. I sent a note to his syndicate contact outlining some size restrictions for the artwork and letting them know that we were fine with Scott playing with the logo in any way he found amusing.

I also forwarded an idea that Sergey had for a storyline involving Dogbert as a branding consultant. The idea was that Dogbert, in order to improve the logo, would change it over the course of the week, only to return to the original at the end, while presenting a huge bill for his bad advice. This, I believe, was an accurate reflection of Sergey’s feelings about the field of brand management and consultants in general. I made sure to tell the syndicate that Scott could feel free to ignore the idea.

Scott got to work as I pinged and ponged with the syndicate rep over legal terms for the agreement. Could we post Scott’s logos on our archives page? Would we put a link on our home page to their website? Would we issue a joint press release? Did we want to share the revenue from a commemorative mug they planned to offer to Scott’s fans?

The syndicate okayed our archive page, we okayed putting the link on a splash page instead of the home page and we both agreed to the press release. The mug seemed a minor issue and I gave it little thought. I figured it was a gesture to Scott’s fans and would be a fun keepsake after the fact. Sure. We’d take our small cut on sales, though processing the payment would likely cost us more than we’d make on the deal.

Everything was going swimmingly and for a day or two I rode the high of having brought together a successful co-promotion with two of technology’s best-loved brands. I began imagining a long line of great cartoonists vying to do logo treatments for us. Absolut Vodka had opened their bottle to interpretation by well-known artists and run ads featuring their creations. This would be even more integrated brand-building since the altered logos would actually become part of the product itself. I had to keep reminding myself that changing logos was bad branding strategy and that this was actually Sergey’s idea.

Then Scott’s first images arrived. There were four treatments and each was a simple integration of Dilbert characters with our logo. One was Wally and Dilbert holding the logo, one was Dogbert looking through the “o”s, one was Alice looking perturbed as the “o”s framed her chest and one was Dilbert on his back with his tie standing straight up in place of the “l” in Google. There was no narrative building over time or any other connection among them, other than the presence of characters from the Dilbert cast.

I sent them around to the UI team and Sergey, knowing we had a problem. The comments weren’t long in coming. The Alice logo wasn’t family friendly. The layouts were vertical and wouldn’t fit in our constrained space. What happened to the idea of a continuing story? And wasn’t a vertical necktie a sign that Dilbert had just been laid?

So back to Scott I went. I thanked him profusely for the wonderful sketches and explained again our thinking about the continuing story and our willingness to play with the logo and I sent him a copy of the note framing our guidelines that I had forwarded to the syndicate. It turns out that he had never received it and had been working under a set of false assumptions.

What a relief. Scott hadn't ignored our direction, he'd just been unaware of it.

An hour later Scott sent us a draft storyline for a five day doodle. It was classic Dilbert -- edgy, terse and wildly amusing. And I could see it would create problems for us. What I couldn't see, however, was that the real hot water in which I'd soon find myself would boil over from a totally different part of our partnership.

If a logo changes every day, is it still a logo?

One of the few convictions I brought with me to Google, based on the two books I had read about branding, was that you needed to present your company’s graphic signature in a maniacally consistent manner; to pound it into the public consciousness with a thousand tiny taps, each one exactly the same as the one before.

This is our logo.
It looks like this.
If it looks like this, it’s our logo.
Because our logo looks like this.

So I was caught by surprise when Sergey suggested that he wanted to play with our logo on the home page. Remember, this was not only the most prominent placement of our signature logo, it was the only placement of our signature logo. We weren’t advertising on TV or on billboards or in print. The logo floating in all that white space was it. And we were hardly so well known in 1999 that we could assume people already had our brandmark burned into their brains.

But Sergey adamantly insisted that we should change the logo as he had done on Thanksgiving with his clip-art turkey and again when everyone went off to Burning Man.

“What about aliens?” he asked. “Let’s put aliens on the home page. And let’s change it every day. It could be like a comic strip that people come back to read.”

I tried not to be condescending to Sergey when I explained why this was such a bad branding strategy. I wasn’t alone in my opinon. There was general consensus among the marketing professionals on staff that it was wrong-headed and potentially damaging. And then, because I didn’t know him very well, I made the mistake of ignoring his proposal. As usual, I had underestimated his willingness and ability to implement whatever ideas popped into his mind.

Susan, whose garage was the first off-campus office for Google, had spent enough time working with our leaders to know it was better to investigate even seemingly ridiculous suggestions than to argue against them without data. So when Sergey asked her to line up a cartoonist, she didn't argue; she found Ian Marsden. Ian began cranking out holiday logos for us and created the first Google doodle (a multi-part logo that changes each day) in May of 2000. It featured, surprise, surprise, aliens making off with our logo.

Google’s brilliant branding strategy of humanizing an otherwise sterile interface with cute little cartoon creatures was an instant success. And as the online brand manager for the company, with responsibility for building Google’s awareness and brand equity, I had opposed it as adamantly as I could. That’s painful to admit, even now.

Credit should also be given, once again, to webmaster Karen, who created logos until Ian was on board and when he was not available. And it was Karen who cleaned up and reformatted Ian’s artwork so that it would work on our homepage. Karen also hired Dennis Hwang, who ultimately took on responsibility for the logo in addition to his other responsibilities as assistant webmaster.

One other person gets credit for helping out with the early logos. Ken Perlin, a professor at NYU and expert on user interfaces created a couple of java applets for use on the homepage in 2000. Ken had come by to give a tech talk, and people liked his work enough to want to have him create something simple for our site. He agreed, and sent us a bouncing heart for Valentine’s Day and an animated game for Easter. To show our gratitude he was given a gift of Google stock. I’m not sure how many shares went to Ken, but it’s entirely possible that line for line, the bouncing bunny code he wrote for us was among the most expensive in the world.

By 2002, Dennis had the hang of things and had established a perfect tone for the logos: friendly and accessible without being overly cutesy. As noted, we had formed a committee to ensure that we were commemorating a variety of holidays and individuals. Sergey saw the many happy emails from users and said, “This is good.” But he still wasn’t entirely satisfied.

The logos weren’t edgy enough for him. He felt strongly that we needed to have guest cartoonists come in to spice things up. And we weren’t changing the logo often enough. We needed more doodles with stories unfolding day by day over a week or more. A friend of his sent some ideas based on Little Red Riding Hood. In the last panel, the woodsman cut open the wolf, with blood spilling everywhere. Sergey deemed it sufficiently far outside the expected, but even he agreed it wasn’t a perfect fit for a family-friendly site.

So we went shopping again for a guest cartoonist. Susan had contacted Scott Adams in 2000 and he had politely referred us to his syndicate’s licensing agent. We tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes and Gary Larson of the Far Side. We deemed Gary Trudeau too political. Bill Amend of Foxtrot declined very apologetically. And we figured fat cats, giant sandwiches and little kids with guardian angels wouldn’t make the edginess cut.

I decided to give Scott Adams a try again. It was two years later and Google’s audience and reputation had grown considerably. I had worked with him on a project while I was at the Mercury News (he donated an autographed drawing we deemed “The Mona Lisa of cubicle art” for a trade show event) and I knew he was willing to engage in extra-curricular activities that interested him. This time, he said yes.

And of course, that turned out to be the easy part.

You may have seen Google referenced in Dilbert Tuesday, Wednesday and today. Scott depicts Larry and Sergey explaining the workings of their evil death ray to Eric and announcing their intent to crash the space station into Dilbert’s house so he can’t start a rival search engine.

The series demonstrates two things: Scott really is not a great caricaturist (Larry is kind of recognizable but Sergey looks like an anorexic Charlie Brown and Eric could pass for Tom DeLay) and you should never piss off a guy who has a daily comic strip that runs in 2,500 papers worldwide.

In my next post, I’ll explain why Scott might want to tweak Google’s management and why no other cartoonist has ever been invited to do a guest shot on Google’s home page, and probably never will be.

See you in the funny papers.

MBA? Check. Law degree? Okay. So… what else ya got?

This clip caught my eye when it came across my Google news alert: “MBA students want GOOGLE” It doesn’t really surprise me to learn that Google is the preferred employer of recent biz school grads, but it does speak to how far into its next phase Google has progressed.

Back in Google’s early days, the only MBAs in the building that I was aware of belonged to Susan Wojcicki and to the VP of Sales, Omid Kordestani, which may explain why the traditional turf battle between sales and marketing never fully materialized at the company. There would be occasional skirmishes over copy points in collateral or tracking of results from promotional efforts, but not the all-out “us vs. them” mentality I’d seen in other companies.

Omid, besides really getting the value of marketing support for sales, just was so damn reasonable about everything and such a nice guy that you couldn’t build up any sharp-edged animosity toward him or the people in his organization. And for their part, the sales team seemed genuinely appreciative of anything marketing did for them. Perhaps that’s because they devoted most of their attention to riding the engineering team to make sure they delivered products that worked as well as or better than those of the competition.

As the company grew, it created a product development group under Jonathan Rosenberg (also an MBA) that was separate from the corporate marketing area. Product Mangers like Marissa Mayer came straight out of engineering and took on new titles and a new boss, while continuing to work on building products directly with engineers.

PMMs (product marketing managers) became the new priest class that translated the words of the engineering gods for the ears of the mere mortals in the rest of the organization. Naturally, they needed to speak both the language of engineering and the vernacular of the unenlightened. While it wasn’t a requirement to have (among your other degrees) a Ph.d in CS, it certainly wouldn’t have been frowned upon.

If memory serves me correctly, Rich, the first PMM, had an ungodly amount of education including a Stanford law degree and an MBA. I remember thinking at the time that it was clever of Jonathan to bring in someone so obviously over-qualified that even Larry and Sergey could get beyond their anti-marketing bias. Up until that point, we usually wouldn’t even take time to let MBA classes visit the campus, since talking with them was viewed as a waste of precious time. It was never easy to add headcount in areas that didn’t involve cranking out code or harvesting revenue, so why talk to a bunch of biz school folks who were Linux illiterate?

(Side note: I once was asked to address a group of Wharton MBA candidates touring Google, which I agreed to do only out of the perverse satisfaction that came from knowing my own brother was a Wharton grad. I knew he’d be amazed to see me, his English-major brother, holding forth as if I had some business intelligence worth imparting to such an august body of his fellow Whartonians).

After Rich, the MBA influx began in earnest, though an MBA alone was never enough to ensure a position at the company. Not just PMMs, but Associate PMMs had MBAs. I’ll confess I was a little intimidated by the burgeoning flock of sheepskins since, as noted earlier, I was bereft of advanced degrees myself. It seemed okay when it was just a sea of engineering Masters and doctorates, but now there were “professional” marketeers on board, with papers to prove it. What would they think about our ragtag ad hoc marketing efforts to date?

It turned out they were pretty decent about it. Of course, they had lots of ideas, some of which were reasonable and some of which needed to be reconfigured to fly in the physics of the Google universe. I was amused and sympathetic as they struggled to map experience-based interpretations of reality and classroom-spawned marketing theories with the way things were done at Google. It was like watching a professional ice dancer learn how to be an enforcer in the NHL. I’d been there myself. and I found I had a role in helping our new recruits find the appropriate pads, helmets and sticks.

I’m sure there are now admin assistants, HR recruiters, AdWords reps, groundskeepers and kitchen staff members at Google with MBAs from reputable schools. The hype has risen to such a level that some folks will take any opening they can get.

So, if you’re one of those MBAs looking for a job at Google, I’d suggest you emphasize your ability to speak geek and think about adding an engineering degree to your resume. Or perhaps consider relocating outside the U.S. Most likely you won’t find the same level of Google hysteria in Johannesburg, though don’t expect the requirements for the job to be any less stringent.

Good luck, and if you get a job at Google, let me know if the MBA actually helps you manage there.

Hey! Where’d everyone go?

I’m thinking just about everyone has given up on Xooglers and deleted it from their feed list. I’m okay with that. Frankly, expectations were starting to exceed my willingness to meet them. I’m happy to keep posting on my own schedule, which is arbitrary and inconsistent (as any of my former supervisors would likely confirm), and I can live with the lonely echoes coming back from all corners of cyberspace.

Not that you asked, but, where have I been?

When my computer crashed, I started engaging in activities that didn’t involve sitting in front of a screen. To my surprise, the number and diversity of distractions the world offers appears to be unlimited. When you’ve been focused very intently on a single enterprise for a long while and then step away from it, the variety of options open to you can be almost paralyzing.

As I started looking into some of these options, I debated giving up on Xooglers altogether and making a clean break from all things Google. Several Xooglers I know appear to have done just that. Maybe this was the time to move on with a new phase of my life and bury the past.

But the thing is, I still I have stories I want to tell.

And while I’m sure the baristas at Starbucks would love to hear me spin my tales to the accompaniment of the ice crusher cranking away on my grande twice-blended coffee frappucino, I have a notion it would be better to keep writing them down.

Kevin Kelley had a nice piece in the Sunday New York Times on how the Internet is turning all knowledge into one big interlinked book. It got me thinking that it would be nice to make a few more contributions to the chapter on Google. It would be a shame if the company most likely to do the heavy lifting on digitizing the world’s information were to be represented only by outside perspectives on how it all came to be.

But it was really last Wednesday’s farewell to Paul that convinced me to pick up mouse and keyboard again.

Paul was one of the first engineers at Google. Among other things, he came up with the idea for PigeonRank. Oh yeah, and Gmail, which he largely built himself in the middle of the night. Paul liked to get to the office after noon or even at dinnertime, then work on into the next morning. After 7 long years of midnight coding, he’s leaving the company. Last week, I went to his sendoff in Palo Alto and ran into lots of Googlers and Xooglers.

Harry was there and I finally heard firsthand how he tried to shove a box back into its rack and succeeded in cutting through a cable at Exodus, almost electrocuting himself while bringing down large numbers of servers. Schwim reminded me that it was his idea to take the back off the server cage so they could squeeze in one more piece of equipment, not realizing that removing the wall meant there was no support for the overhead beam that followed it’s gravitational mandate to conk Jim on the head.

It was great to learn about the latest additions to Meng’s wall of celebrity photos. Meng manages to get a snapshot of himself with (almost) everyone of note who enters the GooglePlex, from Al Gore and Bill Clinton to Jane Goodall and Gwenneth Paltrow.

I got caught up with Salar, Amit, Peter, Val, Jane and Zain among others, and it reminded me what an interesting bunch of people I had once had as coworkers.

So, I’m gonna give it another go. I may spend less time compulsively polishing my prose (which really slows things down) and just post more stories in their raw form. And I’m going to post on items in the news related to Google as I see them from a Xoogler’s perspective. I’m sure you’ll let me know if that’s what you want to hear from me.

That is, if anyone's still around.

The fool weighs in again

Yes, I know I said I was out of here, but I thought it was only fair, in light of my earlier post, to note that the Motley Fool is now saying that Google Is Worth Every Penny.

TTFN