Google Meets Y2K for a Big Laugh

I am not sure you know what happened Sunday night at the S*per Bowl (I think you have to pay the NFL if you say that term out loud, or write it with all the letters).

Sure, you know that the New England Patriots came back from being down 25 points in the second half -- and needing two 2-point conversions -- to roar back to tie the game with essentially no time left, and then score a touchdown on their first drive in overtime, to win the game and the NFL championship.

If you're like everyone else, you also saw all the commercials.  If you could wade through them, and some of them were really a waste of millions of dollars of stockholders' money, then you'll remember them.  Well, most of them.

So an aside ... remember the Y2K bug?  I sure do, and that's because I worked on the Y2K bug for a couple-three years before it was supposed to strike like a predicted earthquake.  The idea was that billions of lines of computer code, that was still operational in 1999, had been written with date fields of only two digits.  That meant that when the clock turned to the last year of the 20th Century on January 1st, 2000, the code wouldn't know it from January 1st, 1900, and the results were not at all predictable.

Lots of things happened those last couple years.  I was the director of services for a group at Litton Industries, whose only mission was trying to fix our clients' Y2K bugs.  Before long, that made me an expert on Y2K issues, and I flew around to a lot of places talking about it.  A fellow named Peter de Jager, a computer consultant from Canada, made an inordinate amount of money flying to a lot of places doing the same thing; we actually spoke to some audiences together.  He was independent, so he got paid -- I just got my normal modest salary from Litton.

I was reasonably qualified to do those lectures, and not only because I had spent more time than most people speaking out about it.  As a matter of fact, I had personally written over 250,000 lines of code that were still in use in 1998, all of which was written with two-digit date fields.  I had tested some of it in 1998 and, sure enough, it had some pretty odd results when I told it the date was 1/1/2000.  So there was at least something real about it, at least for some pottery manufacturers in eastern Ohio.

But as you know, January 1st, 2000 came and went, and the whole Y2K bug also came and went, with hardly a peep.  Computers kept running, planes kept flying.  Whether or not all the reprogramming that got hastily done in the waning months of 1999 helped, we know that, 17 years later, Y2K is mostly forgotten as a bug.

But not completely forgotten, which brings us to advertising on the Sup*r Bowl or S*per Bowl or whatever we're allowed to call it.  Our good friends at Google decided they were going to pay their $5 million for a fractional slice of time to advertise their new product, which is one of those newfangled do-hickeys. 

Not any run-of-the-mill do-hickey, mind you, but one that does what you tell it to, like turn off the lights, or turn on the TV, or any number of imaginable things you can do to or with an electronic device.  Just program some stuff into the device, and you can talk to it!  How neat is that?

Well, Google couldn't wait to do a big-game commercial featuring their devices in use.  They were, after all, so simple that all you had to do was say "OK, Google, turn off the TV!" and bingo-bongo, your TV would shut off.  "OK, Google, turn on the fan" and ta-da, your ceiling fan would turn on and you'd be cool which, given that it is early February, might not be an attractive attribute this moment. 

One leeeeetle problem, though.

In order to demonstrate that a product is "voice-activated", you have to use an actual voice, right?  So Google's ad people designed this nifty commercial showing people saying "OK, Google, do this", whereupon the device in the commercial would turn off something or answer you.

The little problem was this -- Mr. Google, or whatever they call it, may be a "new" product, but it isn't brand new, there are people who already have it.  And, son of a gun, a lot of those people happened to be in their homes hosting Super Bowl parties.  Guess what happened next?

You guessed it.  The commercial came on and sure enough, Google's device worked like a charm.  Now it could have been bad; the person in the commercial could have said "OK, Google, turn off the TV" and the TV would have gone off -- the TVs in people's homes, homes which happened to have the Google device already installed.  As soon as the voice in the commercial told the Google device to shut off the TV, it would have worked like a charm all over the USA in the middle of the S*per Bowl.

Fortunately, they didn't say "OK Google, turn off the TV", they asked Mr. Google something about some spice.  Otherwise, TVs all over the USA, televisions that were connected to already-sold-and-installed Google devices, unable to distinguish between the commercial's voice and the voice of the person right there in the home with the 25 now-angry people wondering what the heck had happened to their TVs, would have been missing the game.  Mr. Google would have blithely shut off their TV too.

I'm sorry, I think the whole thing is just hysterical.  Having spent almost three years of my life trying to prevent a disaster from ancient, 20-year-old software with Y2K bugs in it, I had to laugh when a Google device, one of the most modern of conveniences, almost barfed all over S*per Bowl parties from coast to coast.

Yep, it was a fun night.  My TV stayed on, after all.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.