Googzilla Stumbles Then Apologizes (Gasp!)
August 12, 2008
I recall an earnest Googler in May 2008 accusing me of creating a “fake” screen shot from a Google patent document. I am confident that the Googler, bright smile, direct gaze, was supremely confident that as a Googley person, he was right. Well, he was wrong. The school-mother who crafted his supreme self-confidence and his fraternity brothers who fawned over his brilliance has his head in his patootie. I followed up with an email–not Gmail, thank my lucky stars. I provided the patent document number, and I invited him to give me a buzz to talk about what I called Google’s “profiling” service. The “invention” disclosed in a publicly available document converts a query such as “Michael Jackson” or some other proper noun into a dossier. Yep, just like the type of intelligence reports that wizards at McKinsey & Co. generate for their well-groomed clients.
Every time Google–an outfit I have dubbed Googzilla in honor of the giant, dangerous, but rubber suited monster from the Japanese horror films I loved in my youth–stumbles, I think of Googlers. I recall a situation a couple of years ago when a Googler showed up for a talk at the International Online Show in London. On the panel was a fellow who had worked at the original AltaVista.com. The Googler ran through a canned PowerPoint which was unfamiliar to him. His bright smile and earnest gaze did little to disguise his failure to look at the program, the title of his talk, or how the program would be orchestrated by yours truly. Well, the AltaVista.com wizard gutted and roasted the Googler to the delight of the crowd. At that time, I had a financial incentive to get the Googler off the roasting spit and back into his seat. I failed. The AltaVista.com wizard enjoyed the bar-b-que.
I have reserved comment about the increasing friability of Google operations that must read and write data. In my 2005 study The Google Legacy, I tried in my non-Googley way to explain that the engineers responsible for Google had focused on really fast read speeds. In fact, the company built upon the learnings of AltaVista.com and other information retrieval scientists to use commodity drives to deliver lightning fast performance using a wide range of engineering insights, clever techniques, and elbow grease to resolve known bottlenecks in serving queries. My publisher reports a spurt of interest in my Google studies. We hypothesized that now almost four years after the first analysis appeared, some folks are figuring out that Google has designs on more than online advertising. Also, I work through some of Google’s vulnerabilities such as a digital Achilles’ heel.
My hunch is that my analysis of Google’s weaknesses are now of interest because Googzilla appears to have feet of clay when read-write functions overwhelm the allocated resources.
Why am I reminding people of Google’s focus on reads and Google’s somewhat arrogant attitude toward competitors, customers, and, of course, addled me?
Easy.
Here are some links to bring you up to date on Google’s most recent online outage:
- Google’s very own apology. Click here to read the sincere “We Feel Your Pain, and We’re Sorry”. Yep, I believe this.
- TechCrunch’s report, including useful updates that pinpoint when Gmail went south and when the Googlers figured out what went wrong. Access this good write up here. I love the whale illustration, but I would have used my Googzilla art. Including the error message with another “We’re sorry but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors” line. The wording is remarkable because an account experiences errors because the system is not working.
- Rafe Needleman’s post which was a subtle reminder that some youthful thinkers rely on a communications medium more immediate (but almost as reliable) than Gmail. You can read his post here.
News aggregators have hundreds of stories about this failure, and I will leave it to you to click through the links on Daily Rotation, PopURLs, and Megite.
My take on this problem is that Google’s architecture does some things well (server result sets, track user behavior, sell ads) and others not so well (Gmail, Android, Knol). The decreasing interval between failure and visible loss of service is encouraging to some competitors, I surmise. Microsoft, despite its slow start, has delivered a reasonably solid Olympics service. So, Microsoft stays online; Google doesn’t. That should bring some smiles to the Microsoft faces.
Stephen Arnold, August 12, 2008
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[…] ScottGu I recall an earnest Googler in May 2008 accusing me of creating a “fake” screen shot from a Google patent document. I am confident that the Googler, bright smile, direct gaze, was supremely confident that as a Googley person, he was right. Well, he was wrong. The school-mother who crafted … […]
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