Marissa Mayer, who worked at Google for 13 years, tells the story of a mysterious user who kept emailing the company in Google’s early years.
“The emails he sent us were just a two-digit number. It took us a long time to figure out what it was.
Much later we realized he was writing the total number of words on our homepage.
The higher the number, the more often he sent emails.
It may sound strange, but these messages helped the UI team to keep their discipline. Thanks to him, we didn’t put too many links on the homepage.
Those messages were like a scale of how many pounds we were gaining every day.
Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo as CEO in 2013.
Today, Google’s homepage is still very simple.
It is clear what it does.
Yahoo’s homepage is also very simple.
It is still like the Tuesday market, it is still not clear what it does.
Let that be the mini-history of that market.