3 ms·

I agree that she supported the launch, but Marissa wasn't involved in any of the infrastructure work, machine planning, etc.

influx 9y ago
She was the public face of this work: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/search-now-faster-than-speed-of-type.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/search-now-faster-th... I wouldn't have expected a VP to be involved in infrastructure, and machine planning.
puzzle 9y ago
Of course she wasn't involved in making things work efficiently and reliably, since that never was her responsibility, but the whole reason all of that had to happen was because she decided to turn what normally would be one of the many, many cool internal demos into a public, differentiating feature (and got signoff from upper management). I'll miss Instant on desktop, for the record. It was a great achievement to implement in a relatively short period of time.
- chris_va 9y ago
  I think you're being slightly unfair here in assigning credit/blame/what-have-you. I agree with you that she liked it, and signed off on the product. However, we had to scale the infrastructure 7x. That wasn't a VP level of money, that was a BoD level of money. The decision to push the launch was made by Eric.
  - puzzle 9y ago
    I wouldn't quote numbers (or multipliers) here, but my recollection is that, after a lot of tuning, it was lower than what you mention, at least in the section of the stack that I was involved with. Of course, the board had to give some kind of sign off (which is what I meant by upper management), before even knowing the full price :-), but the case for this differentiating feature was being made by Marissa. It wasn't merely signing off. I don't remember anyone ever bringing up Eric when talking about it. If anyone, it was her, for good or for bad. She stuck with it even if early iterations were clunky, slow or inefficient. I'll grant her that she started with something that I thought unfeasible and almost a pipe dream, eventually seeing it turn into something actually useful, with the help of hundreds (Eng, PM, UX, etc.).
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  (Reached reply depth) 7x infra to support it...what was the value prop for this?
  - puzzle 9y ago
    I have no idea where that number comes from. I seem to remember that a naive implementation would have required 10x or so the existing resources (proportional to the characters in the average query at the time... We know they've been getting longer over the years). But that's not at all what was released. Also remember that this is just the serving path. Crawling is not affected, while for indexing...it depends. My service did not get 7x the resources for launch. We did bring up more capacity, but we also improved things here and there. That's work that would have been needed anyway. Last but not least, there were infrastructure improvements that helped reduce resources in search and other products. Bob Wyman's LinkedIn page says that his team helped with Instant, but also saved AdSense 100k+ cores, while increasing serving capacity and reducing latency. As for the value: speed, differentiation and sheer coolness.

influx 9y ago

She was the public face of this work: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/search-now-faster-than-speed-of-type.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/search-now-faster-th... I wouldn't have expected a VP to be involved in infrastructure, and machine planning.

puzzle 9y ago

Of course she wasn't involved in making things work efficiently and reliably, since that never was her responsibility, but the whole reason all of that had to happen was because she decided to turn what normally would be one of the many, many cool internal demos into a public, differentiating feature (and got signoff from upper management). I'll miss Instant on desktop, for the record. It was a great achievement to implement in a relatively short period of time.

chris_va 9y ago
I think you're being slightly unfair here in assigning credit/blame/what-have-you. I agree with you that she liked it, and signed off on the product. However, we had to scale the infrastructure 7x. That wasn't a VP level of money, that was a BoD level of money. The decision to push the launch was made by Eric.
- puzzle 9y ago
  I wouldn't quote numbers (or multipliers) here, but my recollection is that, after a lot of tuning, it was lower than what you mention, at least in the section of the stack that I was involved with. Of course, the board had to give some kind of sign off (which is what I meant by upper management), before even knowing the full price :-), but the case for this differentiating feature was being made by Marissa. It wasn't merely signing off. I don't remember anyone ever bringing up Eric when talking about it. If anyone, it was her, for good or for bad. She stuck with it even if early iterations were clunky, slow or inefficient. I'll grant her that she started with something that I thought unfeasible and almost a pipe dream, eventually seeing it turn into something actually useful, with the help of hundreds (Eng, PM, UX, etc.).
seanp2k2 9y ago
(Reached reply depth) 7x infra to support it...what was the value prop for this?
- puzzle 9y ago
  I have no idea where that number comes from. I seem to remember that a naive implementation would have required 10x or so the existing resources (proportional to the characters in the average query at the time... We know they've been getting longer over the years). But that's not at all what was released. Also remember that this is just the serving path. Crawling is not affected, while for indexing...it depends. My service did not get 7x the resources for launch. We did bring up more capacity, but we also improved things here and there. That's work that would have been needed anyway. Last but not least, there were infrastructure improvements that helped reduce resources in search and other products. Bob Wyman's LinkedIn page says that his team helped with Instant, but also saved AdSense 100k+ cores, while increasing serving capacity and reducing latency. As for the value: speed, differentiation and sheer coolness.