John Hesch

Alan Williamson attended a lecture given by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google) and noted some interesting facts.

I encourage you to read all of her talking points but these few I thought were pretty interesting:

The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’

Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.

And the most progressive talking point of them all and one that I think typifies why Google is a huge success

Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.