Google Purchases Its First Home

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Google Purchases Its First Home

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday October 2, 2006 @02:16AM from the lets-all-crash-on-the-couch dept.

noparkingzone writes "ZDnet is reporting that Google has purchased the garage that the company first called home for an undisclosed sum. The Menlo Park structure was owned by a friend of one of Brin's girlfriends. Leased to Serge and Brin by Susan Wojcicki for around $1,700 per month in 1998, the original Googleplex is intended to be preserved as part of the company's living history."

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$1,700 a month? by Dan+East · 2006-10-02 02:21 · Score: 4, Insightful

$1,700 month to rent a garage? That much a month would cover the entire house (and utilities) in this part of the USA.

Dan East

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Better known as 318230.
1. Re:$1,700 a month? by jeffmeden · 2006-10-02 02:42 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  No kidding! For that price in Ohio I could get a *huge* garage (w/ attached house), and still have money left over for cable internet (and like 15 digital pr0n channels, er I mean cinemax). $1700/mo 'help with the mortgage' makes me choke.
2. Re:$1,700 a month? by rthille · 2006-10-02 04:00 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  News Flash. There are cheaper and more expensive parts of the country/world...
  
  --
  Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
That's cool and all... by xENoLocO · 2006-10-02 02:22 · Score: 5, Insightful

... but is it really front page news?

I mean, I congratulate the couple on their new house, but come on... :)

--
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
1. Re:That's cool and all... by supremebob · 2006-10-02 02:29 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  No, it's not. This is the kind of crap that I'd expect to see on Digg, not Slashdot.
  
  Oh, you can go ahead and mod my comment down now. I have the karma points to spare.
Was it a special garage? by pembo13 · 2006-10-02 02:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

$1700 seems steep, even for today's standards.

--
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Re:...sell, sell, sell... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-10-02 02:35 · Score: 2, Insightful

Well,
It sounds like you are not a shareholder, and probably would not have shares in Google, therefore it is not surprising to hear that you would say sell sell sell.

It is so easy to say things when you have no stake in it at all.

Even me.
Talk about ridiculous.... by CPE1704TKS · 2006-10-02 02:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

I love Google as much as anyone else, but talk about utterly self-indulgent. Yes, they are cool, but they are no HP, not yet anyway. Once they get to 20 years old and contributed as much as HP has over the decades, THEN start worrying about keeping track of your legacy. Right now, all they are is a great search engine, great mail service, and bunch of free (but cool) software like Picasa. They are cool and convenient, but I would hardly describe Google's contributions as important or essential... not yet. If they disappeared overnight, people would be a bit pissed, but every single one of their contributions could be replaced by another service.
1. Re:Talk about ridiculous.... by Hijacked+Public · 2006-10-02 03:16 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Google pioneered the most important advancement in the history of internet search engines: A clean search page.
  
  Visit Google.com and you get a large well centered box into which you can type your search criteria. A fairly small Google logo, a handful of text only links to other parts of the site. No news snippets, no ads, no headlines from around the world. I don't have to sort out which box searches the internet and which is the stock quote lookup. I do not have to sort through a long gaphical menu to find which brightly colored artist rendering of a smiling something or other represents the link to the smiling "My Internet" search page.
  
  In other words, they resisted turning themselves into another shitheel portal site when conventional wisdom said everything had to be a shitheel portal site.
  
  Google.com is the 1911A1 of search engines. It is plain and simple and does exactly what it is supposed to do.
  
  --
  "Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
2. Re:Talk about ridiculous.... by archen · 2006-10-02 05:21 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Once they get to 20 years old
  
  What google will contribute is probably going to be arguable even 20 years down the road. However it doesn't take long for your legacy to erase itself by sheer chance. Twenty years from now google may look for that old garage only to find it had become a parking lot 5 years earlier. I sort of realized how easily history can be lost when I was looking through a Fender guitar magazine. They had wanted to produce an authentic reproduction of origonal Fender models, however no one actually remembered how they made them. I'm sure 10 years after the company was on its way people would have said, "who cares about how they were made, it's not that different now"... but 20,30,50 years down the road, just spending a few extra dollars for a bookmark in your history can make all the difference.
Waste by pupstah · 2006-10-02 04:14 · Score: 2, Insightful

Another case of companies with too much money, and no idea what to do with it. Yet the same Slashdot nubsacks that bitch when Microsoft wastes money, will cheer this.

Two faced, party of 20,000, your table is ready?

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-- pupkick