MOMA - Google intranet

From Your MOMA knows best, a great article written by a Xoogler:

"MOMA, Google's intranet, was designed by and for engineers and for the first couple of years, its home page was devoid of any aesthetic enhancements that didn't serve to provide information essential to the operation of Google. It was dense and messy and full of numbers that were hard to parse for the uninitiated, but high in nutritional value for the data hungry.

MOMA displayed latency times, popular search terms, traffic stats for Google-owned properties and, at the center of it all, a large graph with colored lines labeled with the names of Muppet characters. I can't reveal what that graph represented, but if Rizzo or Fozzie started closing the gap with the Great Gonzo, Oscar would not be the only grouch on Sesame Street. (...)

As the company grew, the most useful aspect of MOMA for me was the phone list, which contained the title, email address, IM name, photo, extension and location of everyone on the payroll. The individual's name would be linked to a list of his or her quarterly goals and objectives, so you could understand exactly where your proposed project was likely to fit in their priority list before you even spoke with them.

I came to take it for granted that any information I needed about Google could be found on the intranet, from the status of products in development to the number of employees at any point in the company's history. Ironically, the lack of decent search capability would make some things hard to find in the early days, though Google finally hooked up one of its own search appliances to fix that problem."