The Google Guys (19 page)

It's best to do one thing really, really well.

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.

 

 

L
arry and Sergey have always insisted that Google is a search company. Any assertion that it is becoming a media company or a PC company or a hardware company is dismissed as fantasy. The response is, according to Google spokesman David Krane, “We do search. But we reserve the right to define search any way we want.”

Really? Do PC applications, e-mail, cell phone operating systems, Web browsers, Wiki information sites, social networks, and photo editing sites really fall into the category of “search”? Pundits and competitors have criticized Google for stepping far beyond the boundaries of its core mission in an attempt to take over the entire computing industry. In fact, Google used to say that it focused on search but let its engineers and computer scientists dabble in whatever they wanted with 20 percent of their time. Now the company says that 70 percent of its research is focused on its core competency of search, 20 percent is dedicated to related products that include search elements, and 10 percent is anything else.

But there is logic behind most of the company's seemingly scattershot approach to diversification. Put at the top of the list “Because they can.”

Larry and Sergey understand the Internet, and they know how to use it. In the year 2000, when pundits and publications were declaring the death of the Internet, Larry and Sergey understood its enormous potential. The Internet has made computers and communications astoundingly more efficient and less costly. When Larry and Sergey built Google's computing infrastructure to handle rapid searches, they realized it could do so much more.

That infrastructure is too big to be contained in any one building—or any one city, for that matter. On the Internet, Google links millions of small computers into hordes that can speedily make their calculations for people in their region and speed the results back without having to travel halfway around the planet. Sometimes a single task is split among several computers that do the job in tandem, operating as a single computer. That's the main reason Larry and Sergey decided to buy up miles of fiber optic cables at fire sale prices. This vision of massively parallel computing was articulated in the late 1990s by venture capitalists and other dot-com companies, but it took the vision of Larry and Sergey to make it happen. They didn't just build a huge network to move information along quickly, they also created a new kind of supercomputer, one whose brain is scattered throughout the world, connected by fiber optic nerves that make it function as a single entity. It's a network supercomputer.

Google's supernetwork is by far the largest and most powerful network of computers in the world. It's located in “server farms” scattered throughout the world—from Atlanta to China to Zurich—and it's growing every day. One of the largest server farms is located in the town of The Dalles, Oregon, near sources of cheap hydroelectric power and a surplus of fiber optic cables. Called “Project 02,” the farm is the size of two football fields and has cooling towers four stories high.

The number of computers Google has installed is a closely guarded secret. When the company was just a couple of years old, Sergey revealed that the number was “over ten thousand,” and that's still the number Google uses when asked. But the research firm Gartner Group has made an estimate based on the amount of money Google spends on computer equipment each year, and puts the total at more than one million.

These servers include load balancers, to move work from busy or broken computers to others that can handle the work; proxy servers, which store data temporarily and filter things such as spam; Web servers, which find search results; data gathering servers, which index Web pages; ad servers, to pick out relevant ads; and even spelling servers, which suggest alternate spellings of search terms.

Just as Larry and Sergey built their own network to run their search engine at Stanford, they designed a unique network when Google was young. And, just as they did at Stanford, they built it from the cheapest PCs they could get—commodity PCs running on Intel chips, running the open operating system Linux. They don't buy the latest, most powerful generation of PCs for the network. They calculate which recent generation of PCs gives the most computing power per dollar.

Being PCs, the machines regularly fail. Because of the design of the system, that (usually) doesn't bring down any part of the system. The work is automatically transferred to other PCs until the errant machines are pulled out of the system and replaced with new ones. Sometimes, however, too many may fail or a part of the network goes down, shutting down access to e-mail or documents or other services, causing havoc, and eliciting widespread complaints from the people who rely on them. This is the biggest potential problem in Google's vision of network computing. Google crashes are infrequent compared to those of most systems, but many more people are affected by them.

This supernetwork is an enormous distributed supercomputer. Anybody who uses an application from Google is tapping into this incredible store of computing power. This is the main reason Google's competitors have such a hard time matching the company's capabilities. And it allows Google to enter any business that Larry, Sergey, or their ambitious team of computer scientists and engineers finds interesting.

Google is using this power to change the rules of business, from news delivery to PC computing to books to watching videos. No wonder many business executives are—or if they aren't, should be—afraid of this new giant on the block. If Larry and Sergey get their way, it will be extraordinarily difficult for traditional businesses to compete as they have since the start of the twentieth century. Any business that deals in the collection or dissemination of information is in danger of having its infrastructure collapse beneath its feet like Wile E. Coyote standing on an overhanging bluff. Larry and Sergey move like roadrunners, charging ahead with their visionary plans, saying nothing about where they're headed, or why.

There's a good reason for that. They often don't know where they're going until they get there.

Google is an idea machine. Some of the ideas come from the top. Larry, for example, thought of the idea for “street views” in Google Maps—that is, actual photographs of the streets and buildings to help people identify their destinations—before Google Maps was even created. But this is not Apple, and Larry and Sergey are not Steve Jobs. The company is not centrally controlled, and ideas can come from anywhere.

The problem with most corporations is that it's hard to get people to think differently. People are more likely to think incrementally rather than boldly. Many tech companies deal with this problem by creating formalized “skunk works,” specialized teams put together to work on an innovative new idea. At Google, everyone is a skunk. Google's innovation machine is designed to create hundreds or thousands of research projects, many of them oneperson teams. That's the idea behind the concept of 20 percent time, which allows scientists and engineers at the company to spend up to one day a week working on their own ideas.

At a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference for big thinkers in these fields a few years ago, Larry explained how it came about. “Both Sergey and I went to Montessori schools. For some reason this has been incorporated into Google. We've embodied this as the 20 percent time. For 20 percent of your time you can do what you think is important to do . . . . After all, Mendel discovered the laws of genetics as a hobby. As companies get bigger they find it harder to have small innovative projects. We had that problem too for a while. And we said, ‘Oh, we really need a new concept.' ”
¹

Not every engineer has new ideas to pursue, and not everyone takes that time. Some may join up with other people's projects. Some may use the time to take classes. Some may formally set aside one day per week for a project, while others may occasionally dabble. All that's required is letting their managers know what they want to do. “We're flexible,” says senior vice-president Alan Eustace. “You have to have ways to set aside the time when you need to. Otherwise the upstream stuff isn't going to happen.”

The process goes beyond giving researchers the ability to take time off from their regular jobs. Ideas are shared, discussed, analyzed, and criticized. To make that happen, Google has created a database of information about every project every engineer is working on. All the engineers in the company have access to the database and can find out what anyone else is doing. Any engineer can examine the design documents of any project, add comments about the projects, and e-mail members of teams to offer comments and opinions. They can even rate other people's comments. In engineering, everyone is a critic.

Larry and Sergey created that system to prevent ideas from dying before they ever get past the concept stage. “Where most companies fail on innovation is that they don't take into account the whole pipeline of innovation,” says Eustace. “They tend to have a suggestion box mentality. Next week maybe somebody will empty the box. You can't really get feedback on your ideas, and they die on the vine. We have a lot of different ways to get feedback.”

But they also have to withstand the scrutiny of Larry and Sergey if they think it has commercial potential. The founders decide where the company will go next. And they are ruthless judges of product designs. The product designers and engineers schedule meetings with Sergey and Larry to report on progress, and the pair does not soft-pedal their critiques. CEO Eric Schmidt describes them as “brutal.”

Although Schmidt's role is to run the business and focus on growing the company, he defers to Larry and Sergey's judgment about which technology and products will get them there. But it's not always a harmonious meeting of the minds. “There were times when Larry and Sergey would do things I was very unhappy about because they were so precocious,” he says. Their arguments were often heated, and Schmidt decided that it was a bad idea to conduct them publicly. “Eventually we agreed that we would have an argument privately,” he says.

The argument that led to the private meetings came a few years ago, when the company had to decide which browser Google should focus on when designing products. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has the overwhelming market share, but technology-savvy Interneters such as Larry and Sergey favor the more elegant and open Firefox browser from
Mozilla.org
, a nonprofit group that allows the geeky public to design new features. As an open system, it's easier for outsiders to create add-on programs that users can choose to add or not. Some Web sites will only work properly and fully with Internet Explorer.

A meeting was scheduled to include Larry, Sergey, Schmidt, and Google engineers to make the decision. Sergey arrived late to the meeting, and it started late. When he arrived, he hated the approach the team was favoring. “Sergey throws up all over the decision in front of everybody,” recalls Schmidt. “I said, ‘Stop! Everyone leave the room.' I sat down and told them, don't do that. If we're going to have an argument, let's have it in private.”

In that meeting, Schmidt told Sergey, “I'm willing to do what you want, although I don't agree with it.” But he told Larry and Sergey they had to come to an agreement on the issue, and gave them until 6:00 P.M. the following day to do so. Then he left the room to let them fight it out. “This was a test to see what would happen,” says Schmidt.

What happened was not what he expected. The next day, the deadline passed with no answer. So Schmidt went to Larry and Sergey to get one. Their response: “Well, we gave the team a new set of assignments, and we're meeting again tomorrow. We came up with a completely new approach.”

The following day, after feedback from the engineers, Larry and Sergey agreed on the new approach. They had come up with a way to reengineer the development process so that the programs would work with any browser. The issue was now moot. “All the team was happy and I learned something,” says Schmidt. “I didn't need to decide the answer. I just needed to make sure all the ambiguities were exposed and that the right people were in the room to get it set up. Sometimes there's a better answer that's not in the current solution set. Had we stopped and just done what Sergey wanted or just done what I'd approved we would not have gotten to the better algorithm.”

This realization was a real mind-opener to Schmidt. “It helped me understand my role,” he says. “Now I try not to make important decisions unless they're really important ones. Rather, I've tried to make the culture work. The way it feels to me is they are smarter, quicker, more opinionated and earlier than I am. They're on an issue earlier than I am. My job is to make sure that reality and what we're doing match together for a positive outcome.”

Schmidt still operates on that principle today. At the time I met with him in November 2008, he had just come from another debate, although a much milder one this time, with Larry. (Sergey was out of town.) Larry had long believed that there was incredible opportunity for creating applications for mobile phones. Schmidt was ready to bag that market for a while. So he met with Larry and told him that despite all the applications Google and others had built for cell phones, “there's not anything incredible.”