I only had about half an hour between consultation appointments in which to eat lunch on Friday, so I arranged for Gretchen to fetch me some sushi. There’s a place in Penn Quarter next to the Shakespeare Theater named SEI that she swears has the best sushi within twenty blocks, so that’s where she went. As usual in such situations, I gave her my business credit card and told her to have whatever she wanted before ordering my sushi to go.
No doubt about it, SEI sure prepares some pretty awesome maki. I had the Snow White – that’s made with eel, avocado, roasted apple, sweet soy and sansho; plus the Spicy Yellowtail with scallion and jalapeno soy along with their uni, hotate, botan ebi, chu-toro, akami and ikura nigiri.
The nice thing about a sushi lunch at your desk, of course, is that it’s all cold to begin with, so if you are interrupted, as I was, by an unexpected telephone call, you can return to your repast afterward with no decrease in the quality of the experience. The person on the other end of Line One turned out to be Peekaboo, a singer-songwriter with guitar whom I knew in LA back in the day. As regular readers of this Web log may already be aware, she works for Google now.
Peekaboo: Tom! Is that you?
Tom: Who else would it be?
Peekaboo: It’s been so long, I know; I’m sorry…
Tom: Hey, no problem. It’s all good. How’s life in Mountain View these days?
Peekaboo: Don’t get me started. The entire state of California has been a complete mess lately.
Tom: The harsh economic reality has finally set in, I take it?
Peekaboo: Californians aren’t terribly fond of reality, Tom, you know that.
Tom: Hey, I understand – neither is Congress. So to what do I owe the honor of this long awaited conversation?
Peekaboo: Well, I suppose you know what happened yesterday and all.
Tom: Gee whiz, Peeky-poo, an awful lot of things happened on Thursday, June 10, 2010. Could you be more specific?
Peekaboo: With Google, Tom! I’m talking about what happened with Google!
Tom: Um… what?
Peekaboo: The Google Home Page, Tom!
Tom: Oh, yeah, that. Yeah, come to think of it, I did notice that you folks changed it; for what – about fourteen hours, right? Instead of the day’s clever rendering of “GOOGLE” over an empty text field and two GUI controls reading “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” on a blank white background, your home page had all that usual stuff displayed on a background that appeared to be a picture of some sort of strange abstract sculpture. It looked like somebody had bronzed a pile of…
Peekaboo: That was just one of over two dozen images we were planning to rotate in and out of the home page background! Google recruited the youngest, hippest, coolest, cleverest, most photogenic, popular and best-dressed contemporary artists to exhibit their works of genius on our home page. What you saw was Dingleberries, a sculpture by Tuurd Sheissbaum.
Tom: So what’s it about, then?
Peekaboo: It symbolizes the creative treasures deep inside every single one of us!
Tom: Creative treasures?
Peekaboo: Yeah, you know – those unique nuggets that each of us makes and holds in, until Nature itself forces us to release them!
Tom: I see. Very moving. But Google’s seat on the throne of originality was supposed to last a whole day, wasn’t it?
Peekaboo: It was, Tom, but the backlash! You wouldn’t believe how upset a lot of people got!
Tom: Yes, it seems to me I read about that.
Peekaboo: They went totally ballistic! Within minutes of launch, the Google Home Page background controversy had ignited the entire Internet!
Tom: No kidding? So tell me, has anybody out there in the Googleplex ever heard the venerable adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” by any chance?
Peekaboo: Huh?
Tom: It’s a saying we have here back East. But who knows? Maybe it never made it over the Rockies.
Peekaboo: I guess not. I’ve certainly never heard anybody here in California say that.
Tom: No, I guess you wouldn’t. So, what, exactly, were you brainy little Googledroids trying to do, anyway?
Peekaboo: We were just trying to interest more people in iGoogle, that’s all. So they would know, for instance, that they can personalize their Google home page interface.
Tom: Personalize… their… Google…. home… page… interface?
Peekaboo: Uh… yeah, that’s right. Personalize their Google home page interface.
Tom: Say it again.
Peekaboo: Say “Personalize their Google home page interface” again?
Tom: Yeah.
Peekaboo: Personalize their Google home page interface… oh, Jesus, Tom! If you say “Personalize their Google home page interface” three times, you suddenly realize how incredibly dumb it sounds!
Tom: Indeed – now try to imagine how utterly bereft of an actual life someone would have to be in order to care about whether or not they could personalize their Google home page interface.
Peekaboo: Omigod, Tom. I’m trying, but… I can’t; I really, truly, can’t.
Tom: Right. Even if the only friends they have are on Facebook…
Peekaboo: Omigod…
Tom: Even if they can’t get a date in Second Life…
Peekaboo: Omigod…
Tom: Even if they couldn’t sell their most prized possession on eBay…
Peekaboo: Omigod…
Tom: Even if they have exactly zero followers on Twitter…
Peekaboo: Omigod…
Tom: Even if they are the only person on Earth who reads their blog…
Peekaboo: Omigod, Tom, you’re right – even somebody like that wouldn’t care if they could personalize their Google home page interface!
Tom: Correct. So tell me, how in hell could all those people out there at Google headquarters – people with IQs that could boil water, for Christ’s sake – go and do something so outrageously stupid?
Peekaboo: Um… well, Tom, that’s why I called.
Tom: Oh, no. Tell me you’re kidding. Please.
Peekaboo: Afraid not.
Tom: You came up with this half-baked, cockamamie, asinine, hare-brained idea?
Peekaboo: Ah… yeah.
Tom: And you convinced the smartest people on the World Wide Web to do it?
Peekaboo: Uh-huh. And within ten minutes of doing it, the entire planet was screaming bloody murder about it, and now… Tom, I’m afraid I might get fired!
Tom: I can certainly understand why. So, how about you forget that “personalize your Google interface” crap and tell me, honestly, what were you really trying to do?
Peekaboo: Promise you won’t yell?
Tom: All, right, I promise.
Peekaboo: Won’t laugh?
Tom: Promise.
Peekaboo: Won’t hang up?
Tom: Okay; promise that, too.
Peekaboo: I wanted Google to be like Bing.
Tom: Microsoft Bing?
Peekaboo: Yeah. You know, how when you go to Bing, there’s this really cute picture, and…
Tom: You wanted Google to imitate Microsoft Bing?
Peekaboo: Um… ah… yeah.
Tom: Dear heart, I simply can’t believe it! Imitating Microsoft is like trying to be more boorish than Donald Trump. It’s like trying to have tackier taste than the women on Real Housewives of New Jersey. It’s like trying to be a worse crook than Bernie Madoff. It’s like trying to be more ignorant than Sarah Palin. It’s like trying to be a bigger fool than George W. Bush. It’s like trying surpass Barack Obama at being a Panglossian chump. It’s like trying to be a less competent diplomat than Hillary Clinton. It’s like…
Peekaboo: Okay, okay, I get it. But what makes you say that?
Tom: Because everything Microsoft has ever done was an ill-conceived, badly executed, half-witted, pathetic imitation of something innovative, well-designed and excellent that somebody else did!
Peekaboo: Really?
Tom: Yeah, sure. The Microsoft Windows desktop is a bad imitation of the original Apple computer graphical user interface. It was such a blatant rip-off, Apple even sued them for stealing it, but Microsoft had so much money, it could afford better lawyers. The Microsoft operating system is a terrible imitation of IBM OS/2. Microsoft Project is a lousy imitation of Timeline. Microsoft Word is an inferior imitation of WordPerfect. Microsoft Excel is a lame imitation of Lotus Spreadsheet. Microsoft NET is a revoltingly awful imitation of Java Enterprise architecture. There hasn’t been one single, solitary information technology innovation in the last thirty years that Microsoft hasn’t built a rotten imitation of and then tried to put the originators out of business with – often successfully. And that’s what Bing is – an evil imitation of Google!
Peekaboo: Oh. I hadn’t thought about it like that.
Tom: Obviously. Look, back in Italy, down on the boot near Naples, where my grandfather came from, out in the countryside, there used to be these little traveling circuses. They’d go from one village to another, set up in the town square or market place and put on a show. So, in addition to the performers, they always had a clown. And when the clown wasn’t doing his own act, he would provide additional entertainment by imitating the performers. If the performer was the sword swallower, for example, then the clown would ape that by doing the same thing with sausages. All right, then there were these other guys – they weren’t really in the circus, but they put on their own show anyway. Sometimes they would follow a circus around, but most of the time they were the town drunk or the local iodine cretin or something like that. Those people were the zanies – and what they did was imitate the clown. That’s what a zany is, you see, somebody who imitates a clown who is imitating the real thing. And the IT industry is like that little traveling Italian country circus. Here are the real performers – the people who invented Java, and here’s Microsoft, the clown, imitating them with C-sharp. And here’s the real performer, Google, who invented algorithmic Web site search and Page Rank, and here’s Microsoft, the clown, with its ludicrous imitation, Bing. And what you did was…
Peekaboo: Omigod. By imitating the clown, I turned Google into the zany! I made us look like global village idiots!
Tom: Exactly. And I think it’s easy to see that’s what made so many people so very, very angry.
Peekaboo: Oh, damn, I feel so totally, like, guilty now. Do you think they’re going to fire me?
Tom: Would you blame them if they did?
Peekaboo: Not really, I guess. But isn’t there something I can do so maybe they won’t?
Tom: Yes, in fact, there is. Convince them that whenever they are contemplating some new idea, they must boil it down to a single statement.
Peekaboo: Okay… hold on, I’m typing that into my iPad… right, “Boil new idea down to a single statement.” Then what?
Tom: Have everybody concerned with implementing the new idea repeat that statement three times.
Peekaboo: Oh, yeah, I get it! And if it doesn’t sound stupid after that, then it’s a good idea!
Tom: No, I can’t guarantee it will be a good idea. The test I’m suggesting can only assure that it isn’t an egregiously moronic one.
Peekaboo: But that’s got to be a valuable capability, right?
Tom: Absolutely. From now on, I recommend that Google leave the egregiously moronic ideas to those who know how to use them properly.
Peekaboo: And who would that be?
Tom: Why, Microsoft, of course.
Peekaboo: Oh. Right. Thanks, Tom. I guess I better get back to work now. Talk to you later.
Tom: ‘Bye.