Hey Yahoo, Do a Barrel Roll: How Google Wins With Whimsical Tricks




Mashable OP-ED: This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

You have to hand it to Google. With one fun little trick that a single engineer probably came up with in his mandated 20% spare time — getting the screen to “do a barrel roll” — the company got enough free media to make a chief marketing officer weep.

It’s hardly an anomaly, either. As we showed yesterday in our gallery of silly Google tricks, this kind of whimsy is baked right into the search giant’s company culture. Easter eggs are buried all over. April Fools tricks happen year-round. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a company that likes to let its hair down every single day, and it’s what helped them get where they are now.

I’ve been covering Google since it was squeezed into one tiny office building in Mountain View, and the things I saw in those early days are still burned into my memory. The lava lamps, beanbags and Friday hockey games have become legend, but this kind of stuff was everywhere. Page liked to show off the working inkjet printer he had constructed out of LEGO. Brin could often be found fiddling with hardware-based screensavers. There’s a reason those guys are always grinning.

Granted, Google won the search wars with its algorithm. If it hadn’t had the Page Rank system, it would have been just another startup. But it’s one thing to have a great piece of technology, and another thing entirely to build a great company. Attracting talent is key. (Yahoo has had a difficult time with it, apparently.)

That doesn’t just mean free ice cream and backrubs at Google, though I’m sure they wooed their fair share of Silicon Valley engineers. Even the much-vaunted 20% time doesn’t mean much if there isn’t a company-wide culture that celebrates trying stuff and burying fun features in major products.

I visited Yahoo earlier this year and saw a well-meaning and earnest company trying to dig itself out of a hole of irrelevance. Senior executives presented their digital media strategy in the form of a periodic table — something I can’t remember a single thing about unless I look it up.

It’s odd that Yahoo hasn’t snagged this reputation for whimsical little tricks and childlike wonderment. With a name like that, you’d think they’d be all over it. But the company had a succession of CEOs who thought in very serious and grownup terms, such as Terry Semel, who wanted to turn the company into a kind of digital Hollywood studio.

Bing has the right idea with its animated desktops. It’s this kind of feature that will catch users’ attention and make them smile. But the large and lumbering Microsoft could also do with a greater reputation for surprise and delight. We all have way too much drudgery in our daily lives; companies can lift us out of it with great products, a sense of vitality and the odd, winking joke. As in any good relationship, that’s what we gravitate toward.

So yes, Yahoo, we’re sure your digital media periodic table is awesome. But try giving us a barrel roll once in a while too.

Gravity

Enter “Google Gravity” in the search bar. Hit “I’m feeling lucky” (if you have Google Instant enabled, it’s on the right hand side of the suggested searches). Then watch your world fall down.

Click here to view this gallery.

Image courtesy of Flickr via puliarf

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