I was a sysadmin for a company called Loudcloud that no longer exists, but we ran web site operations for other companies. We used to get pitched by a lot of vendors. It was usually the typical salesman + sales engineer combo and I was always frustrated that vendors often had difficultly answering technical questions about their own product.

But not Urchin. The crew they sent to pitch us deeply knew their shit. That was probably 2001 or so. I am not at all surprised to see how well they've done within Google.

And the most important aspect was that their product wasn't bullshit: It was actually really great, self hosted web analytics.

I actually miss it. I kind of think Google made a much worse product out of it, overall.

Google analytics is amazing and is only getting better day by day. I worked with some clients that refused to switch to GA because Adobe's Omniture "had more prestige", those were the words they used. But at the end I realized it was more of a job security thing.

Beautiful article and inspiring.

I am a heavy user of Google Analytics. Though, I'm curious how long it will maintain its free tier. If GA provides Google with enough data to understand trends in the web to help refine its search and ads algorithms, then it has a shot at being free indefinitely. If not, I wonder if Google would abuse their ubiquity and eliminate the free tier similar to what they did with Google Apps.