I just had to laugh…

Thanks to Mike Davidson.

Who the hell did approve this atrocity?

And if that brings tears to your eyes, don’t even think about looking at this.

The truth about Google’s home page

From The Beauty of Simplicity we learn the secret story of how Google’s home page was born.

All of us agree: Google’s home page couldn’t be friendlier or easier to use. How many designers worked on it? How many reviews, iterations and meetings did it go through?

Here’s the truth:

“The original home-page design was dumb luck. In 1998, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were consumed with writing code for their engine. Brin just wanted to hack together something to send queries to the back end, where the cool technology resided. Google didn’t have a Web master, and Brin didn’t do HTML. So he designed as little as he could get away with.

“The accident became an icon, of course, and a key reason the company enjoys a commanding lead.”

Moral: Get your product out there as fast as you can, users will vote with their clicks; you’ll always have time to make it better.