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This is wrong. The minimalism of the front page was, in the early days, a point of pride and something that engineers fought for (note: I worked for Google for
by OpinKerfiBjarni 14y ago
This is wrong. The minimalism of the front page was, in the early days, a point of pride and something that engineers fought for (note: I worked for Google for 3 years on a team with a fair number of old-timers).
I'm failing to come up with a link at the moment, but I remember a widely circulated bit of folklore about how an unnamed engineer within Google set up a cronjob that anonymously e-mailed the entire team a single number every day. After a while people figured out that the number was the byte count of the front page, the implication was that it was a metric that needed to be watched carefully.
- sdoering 14y agoAnd even this seems to me to be not quite right. There was a talk, Marissa Meyer gave on Velocity '09: http://blip.tv/oreilly-velocity-conference/velocity-09-marissa-mayer-in-search-of-a-better-faster-stronger-web-2305322 http://blip.tv/oreilly-velocity-conference/velocity-09-maris... Just watch from 1:00 to 2:00 -> One Minute will answer the question. Here she tells the story, how the first Google Design came to live. It is quite interesting. It seems, that minimalism wasn't a rational choice and that it came to stay only, because the data proofed it to be the right lucky choice. I can understand, that the minimalistic homepage was a point of pride. I would be proud, to minify the homepage of the company I work for.
- OpinKerfiBjarni 14y agoYeah, it's really the last point that I was making - that it was a point of pride to keep it small, even after there was all sorts of "stuff" that could be added to it. The fact that it was small to begin with was probably a combination of luck and intuition.
- seldo 14y ago> The fact that it was small to begin with was probably a combination of luck and intuition. Which was the point I was making.