December 26, 2004
Google muzzles the press: a report from inside the Googleplex holiday media party
I'd like to tell you about the party; but it was all off the record! Damn. I picked up so many great stories that it hurts not to write about them.
I think Google made the party off the record because it was Cindy McCaffrey's birthday (head marketing honcho at the big G), and she didn't want us reporting the number of candles on her cake (16).
(Jochen, our photographer, had to surrender all his kit).
It's difficult to see, but there are two "ice" penguins cunningly disguised as waiters. It's obviously a thinly-disguised salute to Linux--and a poke in the eye to Microsoft, which has ambitions in search.
I got there fairly late, as my car was a little challenged by the journey (it's still in the car park). As I walked into the party, I was surprised how relaxed and mellow everyone was. I expected a circus of media people, cameras, the Silicon Valley Hack Pack chasing the boys and Eric around, while Wayne hoped nobody recognized him. It wasn't like that at all. It was very pleasant: there was some live jazz, maybe 50 people were milling around, and it felt very comfortable.
I looked around and I realized that these were pretty much the same people from the year-ago holiday party, which was fun and relaxed too. Sergey and Larry were floating around with no hacks chasing them. I didn't see Eric; but he always heads out a half hour earlier if he can. And pretty much the same Silicon Valley hack pack was there.
David Krane, head comms guy at the Big G came over and said, "I read you all the time, and I share it with my team." (I couldn't keep that one of the record!) That's what I love to hear, and I'll never get tired of hearing it. It is the best feedback we can get. It's not the number of hits that matters, its who's hitting on you that counts, as I remember telling stand-alone journalist Chris Nolan recently.
(She was haranguing me about how many hits I get on my site, and saying that "advertisers will want to know that." Thank you, Chris, you've obviously done your research; but that's not my business model.)
Anyway, I've worked with David and Raymond Nasr for a long time, and not just on Google stories. Raymond, for example, was at Novell with Eric Schmidt, and previously at Apple and Sun. We chatted about the time when Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh (the queen's husband), paid a visit to Novell in San Jose, March, 2000. That was when Pat Mahoney was also working at Novell; these days she is at seed VC firm, Mohr Davidow Ventures. Novell, at the time, was a large contributor to the Duke's charities. I had recently interviewed Eric, and so when the Duke arrived, they rustled together a few Brits and Scots to make him feel at home.
That's how I got to have lunch with Prince Philip; and it wasn't at a table with 200 people, it was at a small round table with six people. Which was great because we could chat. I'd love to tell you what he said about Bill Gates. But I can't: off the record again. I hate to string you up like this.
Back to the Google party . . .I started thinking about what an insane year this has been for the Google team. It kicked off when my colleague at the Financial Times, Richard Waters, broke the story that Google would use an auction system to sell its IPO shares. It would spurn the investment bankers and offer its shares directly to the public. Bold stuff: the investment bankers weren't happy; but so what, kudos to Google!
Then it was non-stop Google stories for months. At the FT in SF, we had an emergency meeting where we pulled together ideas for more than 30 stories. Our editors in London were ravenous; and the best thing to do was to feed them. It's better to feed them stories, rather than allow them too much time to think up great story angles on their own. I wish I could tell you about some of the great story angles that were cooked up down the "U-bend" ---the mahogany row of FT HQ.
As journalists, we soon tired of writing Google stories; but David, Raymond and the rest of the comms team (not to mention the boys and Eric), were sucked into a global media whirlwind and it's still pretty windy.
So, it was great to kick back, tell some stories, and catch up. I just wish it wasn't all off the record! There is no better way to torture a journalist than to tell him some great stories, and then say it is all off the record! It's pure torture; I should report them to somebody at the UN.
I think this one item should be okay. Especially since it is a little cryptic. Tell me if you can work this one out:
A Google/Yahoo joint venture is due on March 20 and it will bring great joy to the Kranes.
cd1326
06:31 AM | Comments (0) | Posted to Media Watch | PR Watch | Top Stories
December 11, 2004
Stuff you didn't know about Google---a report from the Googleplex Xmas party
The Google media Christmas party is coming up next Thursday, which should be interesting. I'm not expecting much in terms of Google news items now that it's a public company, but there should be plenty of gossip to pick up from the assembled hacks [Brit. slang for journalists].
At the Xmas party last year, I met Wayne Rosing, VP of Engineering. Mr Rosing is the key to understanding Google: he is the one that built up the bulk of the Google engineering culture. He is a veteran of Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems, and was brought out of semi-retirement by Eric Schmidt, himself a top dog engineer, a former long-time CTO at Sun Microsystems.
Googleplex in Mountain View: Xmas with Larry, Sergey and Wayne Rosing is coming up
I arrived about half-way into the Xmas party. I was in the heart of the Googleplex, which is a familiar place because it was part of a campus built by Silicon Graphics (SGI). (SGI was once the toast of Wall Street and its shares climbed to a huge valuation on huge sales of its graphics workstations to Hollywood movie studios.) Back to the party: the Silicon Valley hack pack was following Sergey and Larry and Eric around, trying to look nonchalant while doing it. Jochen Siegle (from Der Spiegel---the top German magazine) and I happened on Mr. Rosing, who was unrecognized and thus ignored by the celebrity seeking hacks.
Mr. Rosing was happy to chat about a lot of things; and what he said gave me some insight into Google and its culture.
Interesting facts:
Did you know that Google stores a copy of every web page, except images, that it finds while spidering the web? "We put the data on tape and store it," Mr Rosing said. What will you do with it? "We don't know."
. . .
Did you really believe that Google does ALL its magic with just cheap PC servers and algorithms running on Linux? Google's data centers include a lot of the same equipment and software found in traditional IT data centers. For example, Google has a supercomputer based on hundreds of Intel's advanced 64-bit Itanium microprocessors. There are also a lot commercial IT solutions within Google, but vendors are not allowed to talk about it.
. . .
Google does cooperate with law enforcement requests for information on searches. Mr Rosing would not say how often that has occurred.
. . .
Engineers work in teams but he does not control or set their projects. There is no management of the engineers.
. . .
I asked Mr Rosing why Google News doesn't use a few full-time editors to clear out duplicated stories and clean up sometimes poorly aggregated pages. He looked at me as if I was crazy. Why would Google want to use people? Google News is an engineering solution, he said. It's true: Google News was set up as a side project by its top engineer. It's a decent news site and very popular; but it could be a lot better.
The trouble with applying an engineering solution to news aggregation is that you need to know what the answer should look like. Why not use a trained professional? A news editor, or let's call them a "media engineer." Maybe that would make it easier to understand value creation within Google.
The conversation with Mr Rosing was striking because it revealed how Google sees itself. It sees itself as a hard-core engineer culture that has virtually no managerial controls, and yet can toss out beta projects such as Google News for many years to come. That's fine, but Google is a media company isn't it? But no one seems to have told them that.
Google publishes pages of content and sells ads on those pages. That's a very traditional newspaper or magazine business model, except that Google uses machines to harvest and publish the content instead of using editors, reporters, copy editors, etc. Advertising is also harvested by machines, running a simple auction system between advertisers. And the distribution channel is the global computer network of the internet. It's a very efficient business process; but it is a media business process.
.
Yahoo, for example, clearly thinks of itself as a media company. It is full of media professionals, such as John Marcom from the FT, appointed senior VP of international operations in June last year. Terry Semel, the chief executive, is one of the media industry's top executives (he still lives in SoCal). Take a look at his profile:
Formerly: President, Theatrical Distribution divisions, CBS, and then Walt Disney; 24 years with Warner Bros. in positions including Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer.
Yahoo kicked the engineers aside quite some time ago. Co-founders Jerry Yang (does he still carry the title of "chief yahoo" on his business card?) and David Filo probably still do engineering type stuff; but the business is handled by people who know how to run a large media company.
Yet at Google, there are NO media professionals! They've done well so far, no one would disagree; but can computer engineers grow a media business? This could be Google's Achilles' heel.
cd1930
03:21 PM | Comments (0) | Posted to Media Watch | Top Stories
