Canon PowerShot S100
ƒ/4
11.769 mm
1/50
400
sporting Google Glass as always, and charming us with the story of how Google’s origins depended on the fate of a failed fax… below…
8 responses to “Sergey Brin Solves for X”
-
Good point! It they are staring up at the sky, you’ll know why…
I found a moment on the plane today to write up the story he told us:
“Not many people know that the founding of Google depended on the failure of a fax. Back in college, I wanted to use the web to order a pizza, back before took orders. So I wrote a fax script to order pizza on the web. It was much easier back then, just 20 lines of Perl script. Web programming is beyond me now, I’m afraid. Well, the pizza did not arrive, and we got hungrier and hungrier. So I called the pizza shop, and they said let me check. They did not get the order. So I told them I faxed it in. “Oh, we don’t check the fax machine.” Then I knew this won’t work. If restaurants with fax machines won’t look at the fax, that idea failed. So I went on to meet Larry and we got into data mining and the link structure of the web. It was very lucky for me actually that the fax did not go through. I might have put a lot of energy into online ordering of pizza. It’s part of the randomness of life. And I learned the value of fast development cycles. It’s important to fail quickly, like that first fax not going through. With Google Glass, we build a new physical prototype every month for a sustained seven-month design cycle. The iterations have slowed now as we get ready to ship. But those rapid iterations made a huge difference.”
-
Thank you for your cool shot and generous Creative Commons license!
SFBay has republished your image, along with full credit and a link back to this page, along with our story on Silicon Valley philanthropy:
sfbay.ca/2013/02/12/silicon-valley-execs-shell-out-for-ch…
sfbay.caThank you again for sharing your work via Creative Commons!
–Jesse Garnier, Editor, SFBay — All Bay, All Day! jesse@sfbay.ca
-
Hi Steve, Thank you for CC License, I have used this image on my blog with Credit and Link back to this page. Here’s the post: http://www.techstagram.com/2013/02/24/google-glasses/
Leave a Reply to jurvetson Cancel reply