Your MOMA knows best

Ron made reference to Google’s intranet, which is known as MOMA, though no one seems to remember how this sobriquet was first assigned. MOMA was designed by and for engineers and for the first couple of years, its home page was devoid of any aesthetic enhancements that didn’t serve to provide information essential to the operation of Google. It was dense and messy and full of numbers that were hard to parse for the uninitiated, but high in nutritional value for the data hungry.

MOMA displayed latency times, popular search terms, traffic stats for Google-owned properties and, at the center of it all, a large graph with colored lines labeled with the names of Muppet characters. I can’t reveal what that graph represented, but if Rizzo or Fozzie started closing the gap with the Great Gonzo, Oscar would not be the only grouch on Sesame Street.

When I worked for the Mercury News, there was constant talk about creating an online dashboard for keeping an eye on the state of the business. The challenge of dipping into all the various legacy databases for circulation figures and ad sales updates proved overwhelming to the company’s limited technical resources, however, and in my time there, no such information could be cobbled together without someone suffering severe peptic distress.

At Google, there was no shortage of engineering talent to harvest business-critical information and lay it out in pretty table rows. As Ron mentioned, with a couple of clicks you could see the AdWords revenue stream real time. I found it a hard not to sip a mouseful of its refreshing statistics at least once a week.

As the company grew, the most useful aspect of MOMA for me was the phone list, which contained the title, email address, IM name, photo, extension and location of everyone on the payroll. The individual’s name would be linked to a list of his or her quarterly goals and objectives, so you could understand exactly where your proposed project was likely to fit in their priority list before you even spoke with them.

My original phone list photo captured my high albedo forehead with such accuracy that my other features were pretty much washed out in the glare of the reflected flash. Even I had a hard time telling who it was supposed to be. So, I swapped it out for a press photo of Mitch Pileggi -- Deputy Director Skinner from the X-Files. His picture looked more like me than mine did and it conveyed a certain gravitas and focus my own photo lacked.

Many other early Googlers used alternative images and titles for their MOMA listings as well. I recall photos of samurai warriors and masked figures with titles like “Shadow Ops” and “Black Ops.” These were later weeded out as part of an upgrade in our overall attention to security. For some reason, my photo remained unchanged. Nooglers looking me up for the first time would inevitably email me, asking about my uncanny resemblance to Mulder’s boss. I’d assure them that the truth was out there.

In fact, the truth was on MOMA. I came to take it for granted that any information I needed about Google could be found on the intranet, from the status of products in development to the number of employees at any point in the company’s history. Ironically, the lack of decent search capability would make some things hard to find in the early days, though Google finally hooked up one of it’s own search appliances to fix that problem.

Having all the information about the state of your employer’s health at your fingertips gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling. Not only can you be reassured about the company’s growth trajectory, you can actually see the results of your efforts as increased traffic, improved clickthrough rates or leaps in revenue. Or not. Your failures are also visible to everyone in the company, which provides an even greater motivator to continuously improve performance in the areas for which you are responsible.

Google eventually clamped down on who had access the complete state of the business; ostensibly because such information needed to be restricted unless everyone was going to be registered as an insider and restricted from freely buying and selling the company’s stock. The loss of access to the raw data and the purging of alias photos on MOMA each marked shifts in the culture as Google became a multinational, multi-billion dollar business.

At the time I left, I could still find most of the information I needed on MOMA, but occasionally I’d hit a password protected page and be reminded that the company had officially relocated from small town Kansas to the emerald lights of Oz. And while it had been a fantastic journey, I was surprised to discover that not everything looks better bathed in green.