In addition, the company will not shy away from releasing unfinished products to its user base, who in turn provide valuable feedback -- when Maps first launched, it received 5,000 e-mails a day.
Recalling an incident which took place early in his career at Google, Rasmussen said one day he was unexpectedly summoned into a meeting with the company's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and other executives.
"I was preparing my defence," he said, for fear the immaturity of his project would come under fire. Instead, Page told him Maps worked well enough to launch immediately.
Working for Google has other advantages, he said, adding that when a bug that caused Maps to malfunction with the Firefox browser was discovered, "we called up the Firefox [lead engineer] the weekend before launch, and he came around and plugged in his debugging code".
While interest in the Maps project has always been relatively strong, the engineer said it skyrocketed when satellite imagery was added. Web traffic levels increased overnight by a factor of 10-15 times, Rasmussen claimed.
Although life at Google is good, it's not always predictable. The company's Moon mapping service -- which launched on the anniversary of the original moon landing -- turned out to be partly a practical joke on Rasmussen.
"I was getting all these congratulatory e-mails and I didn't know what the heck was going on," he said, noting Moon was developed in the US. One e-mail was from a friend of astronaut Neil Armstrong who apparently appreciated the software.
Ultimately the engineer is extremely enthusiastic about his project, which has in recent times seen a myriad of third-party programmers use its now-public programming interfaces to add external functionality. Even Microsoft's competing Virtual Earth product -- released this week -- was praised by Rasmussen.
"It's quite good," he grudgingly admitted.
AJAX is NOT "web applications with sophisticated graphics"! This is the second time I have seen a CNet article completely miss the point on what exactly the term "AJAX" refers to. Nowhere in "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML" is "graphics" mentioned!
AJAX refers to the ability of a web app to talk with the server and respond dynamically to user interaction without redrawing the screen. It could do this just as easily with a text-only application as with a graphics-intensive app such as Google Maps.
Please, CNet, get this straight! If you're going to latch on to the latest buzzwords, at least use them correctly!