The bug that almost killed Google's Pac-Man doodle
I did one of the code reviews for the Pac-Man doodle (and actually, the part I was responsible for reviewing focused specifically on sound, so this was kinda my bad).  We had an early sneak-peak: Marcin was a UX designer for what was my 80% project at the time, so he'd passed it around the office looking for feedback.<p>One of the factors we'd identified in the post-mortem was actually the difference in Google culture vs. the rest of the world culture.  When we heard strange whirring noises coming from nearby computers in the office, our first impulse was "Woah, that's really cool!  We're seriously going to launch this on the home page?  Can I help?"  While at many other offices, if you hear strange whirring noises from an employee's computer, the reaction is "You're fired!"<p>Similar cultural mismatches have been responsible for a few other gaffes, eg. Google Buzz was a huge hit internally because pretty much everything inside Google is (was?) public anyway and people are very tolerant of different opinions, and it never occurred to us that people could be seriously harmed by others' knowing details of their lives.